General Dean S Story

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GENERAL DEAN'S STORY

GENERAL
DEAN'S
STORY

a# fo/a to William i. Woraen u^

MAJOR GENERAL
WILLIAM F. DEAN

New York

THE VIKING PRESS

COPYRIGHT 1954 BY WILLIAM F. DEAN
COPYRIGHT 1954 BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

PUBLISHED BY THE VIKING PRESS IN MAY 1954

PUBLISHED ON THE SAME DAY IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED

Parts of this book appeared in a serial version
in The Saturday Evening Post under the title
"My Three Years as a Dead Man."

Library of Congress catalog card number: 54-7569

PRINTED IN U. S. A. BY H. WOLFF BOOK MANUFACTURING COMPANY

To the many frienag

who for three long years

never gave up hope

Table oj Content

Collaborator's Note Ix

Introductory 3

i A War Begins 5

ii Men Against Tanks 17

in The Lonesome Mountains 40

iv The Capture 59

v A Small Boy from Texas 83

vi The Battle of Ideas 107

vii Colonel Kim and Friends 136

viii A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 155

ix A Trip to Manchuria 182

x People, Cold, and Flies 206

xi My Friend Wilfred Burchett 227

xn Mail, Books, and Movies 251

xin The Long, Long Last Days 274

Korean War Chronology 299

Index 3*

Photograph

Mrs. Dean receives from President Truman the Congressional

Medal of Honor awarded to her husband
General Dean's daughter and his grandson waiting for the plane

bringing the General home
Mrs. Dean receives congratulations after General Dean's name

appeared on the list of prisoners of war
William F. Dean, Jr., looks at pictures of his father
General Dean at the airfield upon arrival
President Eisenhower welcomes General Dean
A lookout post on the 38th parallel
South Korean troops march toward the front
South Korean soldiers escort refugees from a burning town
South Koreans applaud American soldiers
Lieutenant General Walker and General Dean examine a map near

the front lines
Three American soldiers who worked their way hack through

enemy lines

Infantrymen of the 24th Division rest in a field
This wrecked Red tank stands as a memorial to General Dean
Pictures of General Dean taken by the North Koreans
American soldiers captured by North Korean forces
General Dean during an interview with Wilfred Burchctt, cor-
respondent of Le Soir
General Dean and Wilfred Burchctt
General Dean writing letters
General Dean taking his daily walk
General Dean playing chong-gun, a form of chess
General Dean arriving at Panmunjom
General Dean during an inter vie w at Freedom Village
General Dean is interviewed by news correspondents

AUOVK AND KKYOM) '1111. CAM. OF DUTY

Mrs William I'. Dean of Berkeley, California, receives from President Truiran, on

I, nu ,rv 9 .9,-., the Concessional Medal of Honor : nvardcd ro her husband Ma,oi

General William F. Denn, missing in action in Korea. Brigadier General Robert

Landrv is at: center. (}l r iJc World Photos)

William F, Dean, Jr., then a second

classman at; the U.S. .-Military Acad-
emy, looks at some of the first pictures
of his father to be made available after
his release, September 4, 1953. (/h'sa-
c'urtcd Tress News photo)

(.Ab(n\') General Dean embraces his mother at the airfield upon arrival, Sep-
tember 23, 1953. The General's wife is at the right. (Wide World Photos)

(Bcloiv) President Kisenhower welcomes General Dean during a visit to the
White I louse, October 21, 1953. ( If/t/f W'orhl I'hotos)

(Above) A lookout post on the tfth parallel. On |unc : 4 , i< h -,, \Jonh korrm
troops invaded South Korea on a wide front. (ITA/i- II WA/ /Y.^/an

(Below) South Korean troops march toward the front on June 30, 1950. (Wide
World Photos)

(Above) South Korean soldiers escort refugees from a burning town near the
battle line, July 8, 1950. (Wide World Photos)

(Below) South Koreans applaud American soldiers as they arrive in an unidentified
city shortly before moving into the front lines, July 8, 1950. (Wide World Photos)

(Above} Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, Commanding General U.S.
Eighth Army (left), and General Dean, Commanding General 24th Infantry Divi-
sion, examine a map near the front lines. July 8, 1950. (Wide World Photos)

(Below) Three American soldiers, who worked their way back through enemy

lines, are safe in Yongdong on July 27, 1950, one week after the fall of Taeion.

(Wide World Photos)

(Above) Infantrymen of the 2 4th Division rest in a field, July 29, 1950. ( Wide
World Photos)

(Below) This \vrccked Red tank stands on a Taejon street corner as a memorial
to General Dean. After the battle he eluded the enemy for thirty -five days, until,
weakened and sick, he was captured on August 25, 1950. (Wide World Photos)

These t\vo pictures were taken by die Communists in Nonh Korea in October 1950.

(East I 'o to)

The official Soviet photo agency, which distributed this picture, describes
as American soldiers captured by North Korean forces. (Ititerj/Jtiui/t

Photos)

When General Dean asked his interpreter, Lee Kyu Ilyun,
about other American prisoners, Lcc replied, "Oh, the men in
your camps are very happy, very merry, very cheerful, happy.
They're whistling and singing and cracking jokes all the time."

Ncivs

This picture of General Dean was taken on December :i, 1951, during an interview
with Wilfred Burchetr, correspondent of Lc Soir. This was the General's first con-
tact with the outside \vurld since his capture. (International News Photos)

(Above) General Dean and \Vilfrcd Burchcrr in rlic General's cramped c|unrtcrs
about ten miles from Pyongyang. (\\ r !dc World I'botos)

(Ih'low) General I)c;in writing letters -with difficulty. For more than a ye;ir he
had been without: writing materials of any kind, (Eastfoto)

(J/wiv) General Dean taking his daily walk. Because of strict orders that he Mas

not to be seen, it \\as only toward the end of his captivity that he \vas permuted

to" exercise. (\\ r idi! W'orld Photos)

(Below] General Dean passes the time immediately before his release playing
chont>-o'un, a form of chess, with an unidentified Communist guard. (Wide World

Photos')

General Denn arriving at Panmunjoni for repatriation, September 4, 1953.
World Vhotos)

<- ^ "-"* x^jrrSztr Vi " np! attcr rqxun;

General Dean is interviewed by ne\\s correspoiulenis m I'Yeetlom Village on the

first da}' of his release, after ha\inL> been a prisoner of the Communists' for three

years. (IT/t/c World I'boios)

Collaborator's! Note

When Major General William F. Dean and I sat down to put
his experiences into book form, I was equipped with a tape
recorder, various maps, some reference books, and materials
for writing down quickly the things he told me before I
should forget them.

General Dean, on the other hand, was equipped with noth-
ing whatever but an astonishing and almost frightening abil-
ity to recall, without props, every single thing that had hap-
pened in three years. He had forgotten nothing. For more
than fifty hours he told the story of his three years day by
day, hour by hour, with places, dates, the quality and quantity
of meals, Korean names, temperatures, crop conditions, house
plans, speeches made to him, anecdotes, military details, bits
of Communist theory and practice. Seldom did he hesitate,
and never did he fail to recall an important fact. A single
notebook finally was produced, mainly to help with transla-
tions of Korean words but he had possessed neither this nor
any other writing materials during the first year and a half
of his captivity.

It may be heresy for a writer to admit it, but the fact is,
General Dean wrote this book himself by speaking it. Not
only are the facts his own, without additions from me, but
the language is his own. The writing consisted mainly of re-
moving from the tape-recorder report the pauses, occasional

ix

x Collaborator's Note

repetitions, and sounds of rattling maps which interrupted or

slowed the fascinating telling.

For two men of differing professions, I think we worked in
remarkable harmony. I didn't force him to match my con-
tinual cigarette smoking; he did not insist that I arise at his
customary five a.m., walk five miles a day, or run up stairways
rather than use elevators.

On only one point did we have a serious disagreement.
William Frishe Dean is an almost painfully honest man. I'm
quite sure that he has stood off from himself in judgment,
given himself the benefit of equitable doubts (but no more),
and weighed his own conduct as a general, a fugitive, and a
prisoner. The result is his considered and definite decision: he
does not think General Dean is either a great commander or
a true hero.

I think he is.

WILLIAM. L. WORDEN

GENERAL DEAN'S STORY

Introductory

If the story of my Korean experiences is worth telling, the
value lies in its oddity, not in anything brilliant or heroic.
There were heroes in Korea, but I was not one of them.
There were brilliant commanders, but I was a general cap-
tured because he took a wrong road. I am an infantry officer
and presumably was fitted for my fighting job. I don't want
to alibi that job, but a couple of things about it should be
made clear. In the fighting I made some mistakes and I've
kicked myself a thousand times for them. I lost ground I
should not have lost. I lost trained officers and fine men. I'm
not proud of that record, and Pm under no delusions that my
weeks of command constituted any masterly campaign.

No man honestly can be ashamed of the Congressional
Medal of Honor. For it and for the welcome given to me
here at home in 1953, I'm humbly grateful. But I come close
to shame when I think about the men who did better jobs-
some who died doing them and did not get recognition. I
wouldn't have awarded myself a wooden star for what I did
as a commander. Later, as fugitive and prisoner, I did things
mildly out of the ordinary only at those times when I was
excited and not thinking entirely straight; and the only thing
I did which matteredto my family and perhaps a few others
was to stay alive.

Other prisoners resisted torture, but I wasn't tortured.

3

4 General Dean's Story

Others hid In the hills and finally escaped, but I failed in my
escape attempts. Others bluffed the Communists steadily,
whereas I was lucky enough to do it only once in a while.
Others starved, but I was fed and even learned to like ki?nchee.
Others died for a principle, but I failed in a suicide attempt.

I can justify writing this book only because mine -was an
adventure without a heroand because I did see the face of
the enemy close up, did have time to study his weaknesses
and his remarkable strengths, not on the battlefield but far
behind his lines. I saw communism working with men and
women of high education or none, great intelligence or little
and it was a frightening thing.

Otherwise I can guarantee only to show how a grandfather
came close to hating little boys, how important standing up
is when you haven't been able to stand for sixteen months
and the best way to kill a fly. I ought to know. I swatted
40,671 flies in three years and counted every carcass. There
were periods when I was batting .850 and deserved to make
the big leagues.

CHAPTER I

A. 'War

As a general officer, I'm an in-between, curious sort, who never
went to West Point, did not see action in World War I, and
did not come up from the enlisted ranks. I was born in Car-
lyle, Illinois, on August i, 1899 (almost between centuries).
My dentist-father, Charles Watts Dean, was partially respon-
sible for my interest in the Army. He took me to the 1904
St. Louis Exposition, where I saw West Point cadets and sol-
diers drilling and I never quite rid myself of the interest they
aroused.

Not that this interest did me any particular good for a long
time. I spent my boyhood in Carlyle, much of it doing body-
building exercises. I suppose I'm still something of a physical-
fitness crank, in that I do daily calisthenics, try to walk at
least five miles a day, and never ride an elevator if it's prac-
ticable to run up and down stairs. One of my first jobs was
selling magazines to make spending money, and I developed
quite a resentment against the Saturday Evening Post when its
circulation men appointed a second agent in town during a
small boom. I thought then that they had robbed me of a
chance to make real profits, but I guess we're friends now.
Early in 1954 the Post published six articles containing por-
tions of this book.

After graduating from high school I tried for the Military

5

6 General Dean's Story

Academy at West Point and missed, which was a severe dis-
appointment. I also tried to enlist for World War I, but my
mother, Elizabeth Frishe Dean, refused her permission, so I
missed on that too. (I was under-age to enter the Army with-
out permission.)

The only military organization I could join was the Stu-
dents' Army Training Corps at the University of California,
where I enrolled in what now would amount to a pre-law
course. The whole family moved west, and the surviving
members still live in Californiamy mother in Berkeley; my
sister, Mrs. Leonard Ver Mehr, at Antioch; and my brother
David at Kenwood.

To stay in the university I earned money as a temporary
stevedore on the San Francisco docks, as a trolley conductor
or motorman, briefly as a restaurant dishwasher, and then as
a beat-pounding patrolman on the Berkeley police force when
August Vollmer, father of many modem criminology meth-
ods, was testing his ideas as chief of police.

I should have earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1921, but
failed a course in legal contracts and so had to stay another
year. I never did complete work for the doctor of laws degree
toward which I was aiming, but I've never regretted this
especially. I didn't care much for the law, and I've always
been disturbed by the victories of technicalities over equity.

Besides, I just couldn't stay away from the Army. Perhaps
it was my mother's German blood beginning to tell. I secured
a regular commission as a second lieutenant on October 18,
1923, on the basis of my student reserve training and an ex-
amination. My first post was fairly indicative of what was to
come an assignment to troops of the 3 8th Infantry Regiment
at Fort Douglas, Utah.

This was the period in which, contrary to the popular re-

A War Begins 7

frain, practically nobody loved a soldier. Enlistments were
difficult, promotions for junior officers were slow to non-
existent because of the "bulge" of company-grade regular offi-
cers who had stayed in the Army after World War I, and
relations between military posts and adjacent cities were cool,
at best, and more often on the level of ignoring each other.

But we in the Army still did have some horses, and these
brought about what was to me the most important event of
my three years at Fort Douglas a young lady fell off a horse
on her head. The post commandant, as a gesture toward ce-
menting understanding between people at the fort and in
Salt Lake City, had organized a Saturday riding group, and
young women from the town were invited to use the Army
horses. Some of the younger officers kept polo ponies, and I
had a couple of my own (they could be bought for thirty
dollars each, and we schooled them ourselves), but for the
civilian riders we usually saddled up some of the older, pre-
sumably safer Army-owned stock. One Saturday when I had
the duty of assigning the riders, I took a look at a pretty girl
named Dorothy Welch and decided she had a little too much
daring for most of our horses. So I put her up on old Dick,
an elderly crow-bait who was the non-moving champion of
our stable. I thought not even she would be able to get him
past a walk, but I was wrong. Somehow she got old Dick into
a gallop, and he promptly threw her in a gully.

She suffered a skull fracture and went into a coma from
which she didn't recover for twelve days. I felt terribly re-
sponsible for the accident and went to her home frequently
to see her. There I met one of her close friends, Mildred Dern,
also of Salt Lake.

That old horse Dick was no friend of mine. After Miss
Welch recovered and I had started taking Mildred riding at

8 General Dean's Story

Fort Douglas, he ran away with her too. But she clung to his
back and ducked her head as he tried to brush her off on a
stable door. Mildred married me, in spite of him; and the
sale of two polo ponies helped to finance the wedding.

Immediately after we were married we were transferred
to the Panama Canal Zone, for three more years of duty with
troops. In both posts I coached boxing and basketball teams
but never was a serious competitor myself even though I
seem to have a minor reputation as a boxer now, the result
of a Communist photograph showing me shadow-boxing while
in captivity.

The rest of my prewar duty was just average. I was a lieu-
tenant for twelve years. At Fort Douglas I served with troops,
then attended the Fort Benning Infantry School in 193 1, serv-
ing with a tank battalion there and going on to a second
course, at the Tank School. I returned to the Pacific Coast in
1932, with technical assignment to the 30th Infantry Regi-
ment. But my actual duty was with the Civilian Conservation
Corps, first as commander of Camp Hackamore, in Modoc
County, California, while the corps built trails and roads, then
in the CCC headquarters at Redding.

Back on more normal duty, I went to the Command and
General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, then spent two
more years with troops in Oahu, T.H. After that there were
more schools: the Armed Forces Industrial College in Wash-
ington; the Field Officers course at the Chemical Warfare
School; the Army War College.

I was lucky to make captain in 1936, and major in 1940,
when I was assigned to a series of desk jobs in Washington-
first on the War Department's General Staff as a junior mem-
ber, then assistant secretary of it, finally executive officer of
the Requirements Division in Ground Forces headquarters.

A War Begins 9

My temporary rank went up to lieutenant colonel in 1941, to
colonel in 1942. In 1943 I became head of the Requirements
Division, which is concerned with new weapons, electronics,
training literature, and visual aids.

I finally got what I wanted another job with troops, this
time as assistant commander of the 44th Infantry Division,
just preparing to go to Europe in late 1943 but I nearly
missed my second war. During a demonstration of flame-
throwers to division officers, the flame-thrower leaked on the
lieutenant operating it. In agony as the napalm set his clothing
afire, he struggled to rid himself of the weapon but instead
flipped the hose, spraying napalm. Another officer and I, both
rushing toward him, caught the slash of fire; but I was the
lucky one. Both the other men died. I didn't even know my
leg had been burned until I started to walk off after the others
had been taken away in an ambulance. Then someone noticed
that my trouser leg was in tatters below the knee. I too went
to the hospital, but doctors saved my leg. I was still on
crutches when the division sailed, but I sailed with it.

We landed in France on Omaha Beach behind the amphib-
ious assault forces, and for the next several months moved
generally east and south across France, Germany, and Austria.
When Major General Robert L. Spragins was invalided home
in December 1944, I took command of the division a fine
fighting group that had been trained and indoctrinated by
Major General James L Muir and brought to peak battle
efficiency by General Spragins. I've always been proud of the
44th, which did fine jobs at Sarrebourg, Sarreguemines, Mann-
heim, and in front of Heidelberg, where one of the most out-
standing artillerymen I've ever known, then Brigadier Gen-
eral William A. Beiderlinden, used mass time-on-target fire
and a couple of other tricks to convince a whole sector of

io General Dean's Story

Germans that surrender was the only course for reasonable
men and thereby avoided having to damage the city's famous
old buildings. The division went on to fight at Goppingen,

Ulm, Alemmingen, Kempten, Fern Pass, and Resia Pass. When
the war ended we were In the Inn Valley, with our head-
quarters at Innsbruck and had lost only forty-two men by
capture during the entire war. That minor detail especially
pleased me. I've always thought that to say Kamerad was one
of the most degrading things that could happen to a soldier.

The 44th Division came home shortly after V-E Day and
was retraining to go to the Pacific when the Japanese surren-
dered. I left the division command almost Immediately, going
to Leavenworth again, this time to organize and direct new
command classes.

In October 1 947 I was sent to South Korea as military gov-
ernor and deputy to Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, then
commanding the American occupation forces. With head-
quarters at Seoul, I had the duty of making the South Korean
civil government work during the final period before it was
turned over to the Koreans and military occupation ended.
I had over-all command of such activities as police work,
rice collection to make sure that the hungry population had
enough to eat, operation of railroads and telegraphs. The
Korean constabulary was also under my command. Most of
these activities were manned by Americans in executive posi-
tions, with Koreans sitting beside them to study their methods,
and also filling most of the jobs on lower levels, without
American opposite numbers.

This was a transition period for the Koreans. Under the
Japanese, Koreans never had been allowed to hold executive
positions or even jobs Involving much responsibility. For ex-
ample, Koreans could be railroad firemen or station agents,

A War Begins 1 1

but not locomotive engineers. In government, they never had
held policy-making positions. The result was that no trained
cadre existed, once the Japanese had been ousted. So U. S.
occupation forces, in contrast to the situation in Germany
and Japan, not only had to change the methods and philoso-
phy of the previous government but also had to train Korean
personnel for almost every job. The whole business was com-
plicated further by the artificial division of the country on
the 38th parallel, with disruption of the entire economy,
blocking of railroads, and division of families between demo-
cratic and Communist regimes.

We also had the job of setting the new Korean govern-
ment-to-be on its feet. Having had no government of their
own for generations and never a free election in four thou-
sand years of their history, the Koreans were completely
lacking in machinery and training for holding an election.
During the troubled months preceding the election in 1948,
I traveled the American-occupied part of the peninsula many
times, making speeches for our rice collection and other pro-
grams, setting up election boards, even arranging for polling
places and protection of voters from coercion and Communist
Interference.

After the elections the newly chosen Korean officials took
over their own government, on August 15, 1948. The occu-
pation ended officially, and my civil job with it. I became
commander of the yth Infantry Division, with headquarters
at Seoul still, but immediately began arranging the withdrawal
of that division to stations in northern Japan. We completed
that movement in January 1949; and my headquarters became
the city of Sapporo, on Hokkaido island. But in May, Lieu-
tenant General Walton Walker called me to Yokohama as
chief of staff for the Eighth Army. In October, when a sud-

1 2 General Dean's Story

den transfer left the 24th Infantry Division without a com-
mander, I managed to talk myself Into the job, and moved
once more, to Kokura, on Kyushu, the most southerly Jap-
anese Island.

Kokura is only one hundred and forty miles from Pusan,
the nearest point on the Korean peninsula, and faces the
Korea Strait, across which Korean and Japanese fleets, armies,
and fishing boats have warred for thousands of years. If you
like history, this was the strait In which a divine wind the
kamikaze arose to turn back a Korean fleet trying to invade
ancient Japan, thus reinforcing the Japanese in their belief
that the island peoples were invincible. It also provided both
a rough precedent and a name for the Japanese pilots who
flew their aircraft into American ships during the last days of
World War II.

At Kokura, on June 24, 1950, the officers of the 24th Divi-
sion headquarters staged a costume party. I am slightly more
than six feet tall, and that summer I weighed two hundred
and ten pounds. The black stovepipe hat of a Korean gentle-
man sat foolishly high on my head, and the long robes proper
to a yong-bon (one of the people who do not work) flopped
somewhere around my knees. My wife came dressed as a
well-born Korean lady, and our double costume was a con-
siderable success.

As a troop commander, I believe in hard work for officers
and men; and it was quite obvious on this evening that the
officers I had been working hard for several months enjoyed
seeing the division commander looking thoroughly ridiculous.
At the same time, the costume was a not-so-nostalgic gesture
toward the short Korean chapter in my life. It had been inter-
esting and troubling but was definitely over. I had no real

A War Begins 13

reason to expect to go to Korea again. I knew only a few
words of the language. I never had found an opportunity to
know Korean people outside of official circles and the major
cities and I certainly was not lonesome for the variable cli-
mate of that appendix of northeastern Asia.

So I wore the costume of a yang-ban but thought about
Korea only briefly, if at all, during the long evening*. It was an
uneventful party, just one more officers' dance like thousands
of others; and the main thing I remember was that the hard
hat became highly uncomfortable before the evening ended.

The next morning, when I went to the division headquar-
ters building after attending church, the only thing on my
mind was the possibility of mail from my daughter June, then
en route to Puerto Rico with her husband, Captain Robert
Williams, or from my son Bill, who was taking examinations
for entrance to the Military Academy at West Point. But as
I headed toward the post office a duty officer hailed me. North
Koreans, he said, had just crossed the 38th parallel, breaking
the uneasy peace of the border between communism and the
newest of the U. S.-sponsored free governments in Asia.

There was no further information. I went back to our
quarters and told Mildred the news, adding my own predic-
tion: this was the beginning of World War III. I could see
war breaking out like wildfire over much of Asia and the
24th Infantry Division undoubtedly sat right in the middle
of it.

Naturally my concern at the moment was principally for
the division. The 24th had a long and creditable history in
World War II and had been in Japan since shortly after V-J
Day. But the battle-trained veterans of the early occupation
days had been whittled down by time and reassignment until
they made up only about fifteen per cent of the men and

14 General Dean's Story

officers now on duty. The division strength was down to
about two-thirds of its wartime total. Infantry regiments had
only two battalions each; artillery battalions only two bat-
teries. Other units were proportionate. Equipment was all of
World War II vintage 2.6 bazookas and light (M-24) tanks.

We were training, but our program was greatly hampered
by the fact that the division was scattered all over southern
Japan. The i9th Infantry Regiment, based at Beppu, just then
was on an amphibious maneuver near Yokohama. The zist
Infantry Regiment was at Kumamoto, the 34th at Sasebo, and
the artillery near Fukuoka. The tank company, the recon-
naissance company, and a company of engineers were at Ya-
maguchi on Honshu; the signal company, other engineers,
and quartermaster and ordnance units were with the head-
quarters at Kokura. I found a light airplane essential to visit
them all. To get them together in a hurry would be a major
task.

Not that it was necessary at this time. On June 26 we had
new information from Korea: the South Korean Army was
counterattacking and the situation looked much better than
it had the day before. Perhaps this would turn out to be only
a slightly larger version of the many border incidents that
had occurred since the 38th parallel had been established as
a dividing line across Korea.

We had several South Korean officers on a tour of duty
with our division, and I began to worry about them. But
when I sent a message to Tokyo, asking whether we should
get them back to Korea right away, I was told, "No, Have
them finish their courses, and prepare to receive another group
in July."

This was going to be a short and easy war.

But by the next day it looked less easy. We received word

A War Begins 1 5

to prepare to meet evacuees from Korea, a job assigned to
the 24th Division in a long-standing plan for action in case
of any major emergency in Korea. In my experience, few of
these long-standing plans ever work out as plotted on paper,
but this one did.

American women and children in the Seoul area were
loaded aboard a Norwegian freighter at Inchon, and it started
around the rip of the peninsula. But the Communist advance
to the south was so fast that the men left behind had to be
evacuated almost before the ship was out of the harbor. Many
of them arrived by plane well before the crowded ship
docked, about noon on June 28.

Incidentally, that ship gave me my first real fright of the
war. I went down to the dock to meet it, but it failed to arrive
on schedule and we weren't able to find out anything about
it. When it was more than eight hours overdue I thought,
"Oh-oh, a Russian submarine has hit it." It was one of those
hazy days when a ship could not be seen from the air, and the
Japanese Coast Guard at Fukuoka refused to send out a search
vessel; so I asked the U. S. naval base at Sasebo if a destroyer
could be sent out to look. We finally put an American officer
aboard the Japanese Coast Guard ship, and he got them to go
past the harbor entrance. Outside in the fog he found the
Norwegian ship hove to, with a skipper thoroughly upset by
orders which forced him to wait outside Fukuoka rather than
to go in to Moji, where he would not have needed a pilot.
The passengers jamming the ship had too little room in state-
rooms or on deck, and almost all of them were immoderately
seasick. It was no tragedy, but just one more confusion in a
confused week.

Personally, I was especially disturbed when the incoming
airplanes brought not only civilian refugees, missionaries, and

1 6 General Dean's Story

military families, but also quite a number of U. S. officers and
men from the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG).
I found out later that a general order issued by the U. S. Em-
bassy in Seoul for evacuation of Americans had somehow
been so confused that these Army people thought they were
included. Brigadier General Lynn Roberts, commanding
KMAG, had completed his tour of duty and sailed for the
United States on June 24; and the KMAG chief of staff was
in Japan to see his own wife off to the States. So there was
no one to correct the confusion before many of these people
reached Japan.

The 24th Infantry Division did a fine job in the reception
of evacuees. Officers and men worked around the clock to
care for the distraught families, who arrived with nothing but
a few meager belongings, and to get them started toward
other points in Japan. We still had no knowledge that this
job would have to be rushed, but rushed it anyhow.

That was just the start. On the evening of June 30 I re-
ceived orders to go to Tokyo for a conference and started by
sedan from Kokura to the airfield at Itazuki but I never ar-
rived. Outside of Hakata an officer intercepted me with new
instructions: I was to return to my headquarters and await
teletyped orders.

They came at midnight. I was to go to Korea, with two
jobs: my usual division command, plus the over-all command
of a land expeditionary force.

CHAPTER II

Me

n

I have run through all of this at the risk of boring readers,
because it all made some sense in relation to the first days of
war in Korea. I knew quite a bit although not as much as I
thought about the Korean people and geography; and my
division was the closest American battle unit when the fight-
ing started.

My orders specified that a task force of two reinforced
rifle companies, with a battery of field artillery, -was to be
flown to Korea immediately and to report to Brigadier Gen-
eral John H. Church, who had flown from Tokyo to Taejon,
in the middle of South Korea, with a headquarters detach-
ment. Taejon was well south of the battle line and an obvious
choice for a defensive headquarters. The entire 2 4th Infantry
Division was to move to Korea by surface transportation as
rapidly as possible.

Lieutenant Colonel Charles B. (Brad) Smith was picked to
command the task force. No commander likes to commit
troops piecemeal, and I'm no exception, but Smith was defi-
nitely the man for the job if it had to be done. He had a fine
World War II record in the South Pacific and was a natural
leader. So he and his 406 riflemen, plus a few artillerymen,
were on their way to a landing field outside Pusan on July i .
From there, they could move by train to the front lines, then

17

1 8 General Dean's Story

somewhere between Seoul and Suwon the exact location de-
pending on which Republic of Korea (ROK) Army intelli-
gence report you believed. Meanwhile I tried to move a divi-
sion, scattered near half a dozen ports, with no ships ready.
It was an interesting assignment.

I myself started for Korea one day after Task Force Smith.
My original effort was made in a 0-54, a large four-motored
aircraft, so I took along a jeep as well as various members of
the division staff and my aide. We got over the airfield at
Pusan without trouble, but there were stalled by a report that
the mud field had been so cut up by the big planes carrying
in Task Force Smith that no more large aircraft could land.
So we flew back to Japan, changed to a -45 (a much smaller
plane), left the jeep and other equipment behind, and made a
second try. This time we landed successfully and took off
again, after a brief stop, for Taejon, where I would take over
the command. It was nearly dark, but I had been over this
area several times in 1948 and 1949, In a cub plane, and was
sure I could recognize Taejon from the air. But when I
pointed out a field to the pilot he only shook his head. If it
was Taejon, the field had shrunk and no longer was big
enough for a -45.

At any rate, it was now dark and there was no lighted field
in this part of Korea. We had to fly two hundred and fifty
miles back to Itazuki in Japan. By the time we had something
to eat, we could get only about three hours sleep, then took
off once more, shortly after dawn, for Korea.

This time fog was covering that whole part of the peninsula,
and we could not even see Taejon. But I was desperate, so we
finally flew out over the Yellow Sea, bored down through the
fog bank, then came back east, following the Kum River line
and dodging mountains under the high fog, and eventually

Men Against Tanks 19

landed. I never thought I'd have so much trouble in getting to
a war. But one thing was definite: I didn't need my yang-ban
hat, then or later in Korea.

My first day in Taejon, July 3, I tried to get a picture of
what was happening, and it was fairly obvious. The principal
attack was on the main road and railroad lines, which roughly
parallel each other through Suwon, Osan, Chonan, Taejon,
Kumchon, Taegu, and Pusan. This was the historic military
route through Korea, followed in dozens of forgotten wars,
re-emphasized by the Japanese in their invasions, and now
being used in reverse by the North Koreans.

To the east of this route mountains prevented easy troop
movements, so there was no other great danger point except
on the extreme eastern coast. The Yellow Sea protected us to
the west as far south as Pyongtaek; but below that the left
flank would also have to be guarded.

South Korean civilians were thronging this road south from
Suwon; and unfortunately thousands and thousands of na-
tional police officers and some military also were marching
south, apparently making no effort to stand and fight. What
might be happening in the mountains to the east was any-
body's guess, although South Korean Army headquarters,
now beside our own in Taejon, repeatedly stated that their
Army was fighting hard there, and occasionally brought in a
captured armored vehicle or some other such token to prove
their claims. But they did not seem to be able to produce any
prisoners of war for interrogation.

Our own force obviously was too small to maintain ade-
quate communications over such a large area, so we had to
depend on South Korean civil telephones and telegraph for
wire communications, and on radio to get our messages
through to front-line troop units. General Church explained

20 General Dean's Story

that he had ordered Task Force Smith to take up two positions
approximately one company at a road crossing at Ansong,
another at Pyongtaek on the main highway. Theoretically
these two positions blocked the two roads down which the
enemy was most likely to come but one company per road
is not exactly a strong block, especially with South Koreans
pouring past them by the thousands. All these Korean police
and soldiers had their rifles and equipment, so it's no wonder
that the sight of them was disconcerting to our own troops
who had been ordered to make a stand.

I approved General Church's plans and asked him to set up
the organization for an expeditionary force headquarters,
then flew back to Pusan. The 34th Infantry Regiment had
been arriving there on ships that day and was entraining for
Taejon. We slept that night on the floor of a Pusan building
that had more bedbugs in it than any other structure I've seen,
before or since.

At this time my own organization was still scattered. G-z
(Intelligence) was at Taejon. The 6-3 (Operations) section
was operating from Pusan, but G-i (Personnel) and 6-4
(Supply) were still in Japan. The 34th was on the way north,
but other infantry units and all support organizations were
still at sea or in Japan.

On the afternoon of July 4 I flew back to Taejon. Still no
American ground forces had been in action against the enemy;
but there could be no doubt that it was coming soon. The
positions Task Force Smith had reconnoitered in the vicinity
of Osan (north of Pyongtaek) appeared to have such strength
that I ordered the whole task force up there, to form one
solid lump of Americans, which might help to stem the back-
ward march of all these South Koreans. The ROK headquar-
ters, now operating under its third chief of staff since the war

Men Against Tanks 2 1

had started less than two weeks before, was torn by internal
strife, with everyone shouting "Communist" at one another,
and everyone apparently quite willing for me to make all
decisions, especially theirs.

I tried to encourage some sort of ROK stand, but most of
my efforts were lost in a fog of excuses for the backward
march. They were short of artillery, they had nothing to stop
the enemy tanks, they had been outflanked there was always
some good reason.

I don't think they ever did try the suggestion of their second
chief of staff, Lee Bum Suk, that they let the enemy tanks
come through, dig ditches behind them, and thus prevent
them from getting back or getting gas. At this time many of
the North Korean tanks were coming through alone, without
infantry support, and the trick just might have worked.

At any rate, I got my first strong contingent of American
troops when the 34th Regiment arrived in the fighting area
late on July 4. I ordered this regiment to reoccupy the posi-
tions Task Force Smith had left, blocking one road at Ansong
and the main highway at Pyongtaek, where an arm of the sea
comes up almost to the highway, forming a natural defense
on the left. The north-south mountain range approaches
Ansong on the right, so these positions presented a minimum
of flanking problems and Task Force Smith still was out in
front, to blunt any enemy attack along the main road before
it even touched this line.

The morning of July 5 the attack came. The only word I
received from the 34th was that there was fighting at Osan
then that we were out of contact with Task Force Smith. At
this time our communications were not reliable. My aide,
Lieutenant Arthur M. Clarke, and I drove through a blackout
up to Pyongtaek, where I met Brigadier General George

2 2 General Dean's Story

Earth, who had been loaned to me from the 25th Infantry
Division as an extra general officer. General Barth said that
he had been at Osan; but that just after he left, tanks had been
reported corning down the road. After that there was no fur-
ther contact with Smith. Worse, a patrol from a battalion at
Pyongtaek had just moved forward and run into North
Koreans, losing one man. This indicated that the Communists
had somehow by-passed Osan and that their forward elements
were nearly to Pyongtaek. While I was there the battalion
was planning to send out a heavier patrol, in a new attempt to
reach Task Force Smith, but there was no report by one
o'clock in the morning of July 6 when we left to drive back
to headquarters at Taejon.

We arrived just about dawn and I had an hour's sleep. Then
my headquarters was filled with Korean politicians, each with
a different suggestion. I also received a disturbing report that
President Syngman Rhee, now at Pusan, was anxious to come
back north to Taejon which would put him in personal dan-
ger and further complicate the military problems.

Then I received one encouraging bit of information: Task
Force Smith, which we had about given up as overrun and
lost, was coining back to Pyongtaek. They brought out the
trucks and about half of the force, but had to leave the artil-
lery pieces after pulling the breech locks and sights so that
the guns would be useless. Both Smith and Colonel Basil EL
Perry, the artillery commander, were with the party which
fought its way through the Communists behind them. For the
next two or three days men kept dribbling in, singly or in
small groups, so that our eventual losses were much less than
I'd feared.

A couple of the early arrivals from the task force also
brought me the first direct word about enemy tankshow

Men Against Tanks 2 3

' forty of them had come down the road, rolling right up to
what the Americans had thought were good emplacements,
and then firing point-blank into them. The fact that they had
been able to see our emplacements didn't surprise me (Ameri-
can soldiers are anything but masters at camouflage), but the
number of tanks did. Up to this time I'd been inclined to dis-
count the numbers reported by the South Koreans, but this
was reliable information. The soldiers also told me how the
infantry had managed to get four tanks, and how the artillery
had knocked out four others, firing in direct lane.

All in all, it was not a discouraging story. It had been the
first American action, we had lost it, but the enemy had paid
a considerable price. I felt betterfor all of a couple of hours.

Then I received astonishing information: the 34th had
pulled back south of Chonanmore than fifteen miles from
the river defense line with its flank on the sea. Units that
had been at Ansong were now a full twenty miles from where
I had left them without even waiting until the enemy hit them.

I learned this at four o'clock in the afternoon of July 6, and
I jumped in my jeep and rushed up toward Chonan to find
out what was wrong, why they had not held on the river. But
by the time I got there the whole regiment was south of
Chonan, most of the men having ridden back on the trucks.
I should have said, "Turn around and get going now"; but
rather than add to the confusion and risk night ambushes, I
told them, "All right, hold tight here until I give you further
orders."

When I reached my own headquarters once more I issued
such orders: to advance until they made contact with the
enemy, then fight a delaying action.

There is no point now in rehashing past mistakes endlessly.

24 General Dean's Story

I have always believed that when there Is a confusion in orders,
the person issuing those orders is at fault for not making
himself entirely clear; so the fault in this affair was mine. But
whatever the fault, the results were tragic. Chonan is a road
intersection from which good routes lead to the west as well as
to the south. Once we had lost Pyongtaek, we had opened up
our whole left flank, defended only by some dubious forces
known as the Northwest Youth Group five hundred or a
thousand dissident, non-Communist North Koreans who had
been armed by the South Korean government but were not
part of the regular Army. Other people had considerable
confidence in them, but I did not share itand the fact is,
North Koreans harried our flank on that side from then on.
There is no doubt that those Northwest Youths were blood-
thirsty people who hated the Communists, but they did us
very little good.

On the afternoon of July 7 I gave command of the 34th
Regiment to Colonel Robert B. Martin. Bob Martin and I had
served together in Europe in the 44th Division, and I'd ob-
served his methods of commanding a regiment in combat. As
soon as I had received my orders to go to Korea, I had asked
Far Eastern headquarters for Martin by name. I knew Bob
would want to get into the fighting, and Tokyo agreed to free
him from his staff assignment.

When Martin took over the regimental command at three
p.m. on July 7 I breathed easier once more. It's unfair to
expect other people to read your mind, but I knew very
clearly what I wanted, and that Martin was one man who
could read my thoughts even before I said them out loud. He
was also my very good friend.

In the meantime the 34th, following my orders, had moved
north once more, setting up defense positions in and slightly

Men Against Tanks 25

north of Chonan. But that night at ten o'clock, another mes-
sage came through from the regiment: the situation in Chonan
was bad, Colonel Martin had gone up from his command post
south of the city to straighten It out and now he was cut off.
There were no communications with the one battalion still
holding the town.

I got very little sleep that night, but about four o'clock on
the morning of the 8th we received word that the situation In
Chonan had Improved and Colonel Martin was back at his
command post.

That morning Lieutenant General Walker flew in from
Japan and told me that the whole Eighth Armyincluding
Walker himself was coming to Korea. So I no longer would
have to wear the double hat of division command and force
command. Together we rode up toward Chonan to see what
was going on. At the 34th's command post, south of the city,
we were told that there was more trouble in Chonan and
Martin had gone up again. Once more they were out of con-
tact with their own front lines.

General Walker and I pulled on north, to the top of the
last rise south of Chonan, with the town about six hundred
yards ahead of us, out in an open valley. From there we
watched our forces being driven out.

A sweating officer coming from Chonan told us that North
Korean tanks were In the town, although we could not see
them. He said Colonel Martin had grabbed a 2.6 bazooka and
was leading his men with it, actually forcing the tanks to turn
and run, when one tank came around a corner unexpectedly
and fired from less than twenty-five feet. The shot blew
Colonel Martin In half. Thereafter resistance had disintegrated
and now our troops were bugging out.

Now a new decision faced me. The highway below Chonan

2 6 General Dean's Story

divides: one part follows the railroad to Chochiwon and the
Kum River; the other goes straight south to Kongju, then
angles eastward to rejoin the other highway at Yusong, just
outside of Taejon. Both routes had to be defended. I ordered
the 34th to back down the Kongju road and the newly arrived
2ist Regiment to fight a delaying action on the route to
Chochiwon. We were fighting for time. The ipth Regiment,
which had come all the way from Honshu, was just getting
into a reserve position. I already had ordered the tanks at-
tached to it to come up on the line, and they came up while
General Walker and I were watching the Chonan evacuation.
These were the same little light tanks the rest of the division
had.

As the commander of the first platoon came up the hill,
General Walker stopped him and asked, "What are you going
to do down there?"

The lieutenant said, "I'm going to slug it out." You could
see that the boy was certain he was on his way to death. He'd
heard what happened to other M-24 tanks against those heavy
Russian-built tanks, but he had his teeth clenched and was
going in.

But General Walker said, "Now, our idea is to stop those
people. We don't go up there and charge or slug it out. We
take positions where we have the advantage, where we can
fire the first shots and still manage a delaying action."

Right there on the battlefield he gave this man as fine a
lecture in tank tactics as you could hear in any military class-
room.

We were still losing a war, but the delaying tactics did be-
gin to delay a little. We weren't blowing as many bridges
behind us as I would have likedleaving them intact is a very
brave thing to do when you're planning on a counterattack

Men Against Tanks 27

along the same route, but when the enemy is pushing you all
the time it's an expensive form of courage but otherwise the
retreat was being fought rather well.

The list Infantry, under Colonel Richard Stevens"!
Six" to his "Gimlets" did a magnificent job at Chochiwon.
With its forward elements overrun by the enemy, the 2ist
counterattacked, regained the lost ground, and in so doing
revealed the savagery of our enemy: they found the bodies
of six soldiers with hands tied behind their backs and holes
through the backs of their heads.

During this period Dick Stevens too gave me some anxious
moments when for several hours he was well forward of his
command post and cut off. Only after the 34th Infantry was
forced across the Kum River at Kongju, exposing the left
flank of the zist, did that regiment withdraw in good order
to Okchon in the hills east of Taejon.

On their way back they passed through the ipth Infantry,
the "Rock of Chickamauga" Regiment, which had taken up
positions along the Kum at Taepyong-ni on June 13. This
regiment put up a determined fight along the Kum. They were
almost completely enveloped and the regimental command
post surrounded before the "Chicks" withdrew to Yongdong
to reorganize. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for this
regiment, with which I served as a captain in Hawaii in 1936-
38. In the battles around Taejon, under the inspired and gal-
lant leadership of Colonel Guy S. (Stan) Meloy, the Chicks
did a lot of killing and made the enemy pay full price for the
ground won. Colonel Meloy, badly wounded, came out on a
tank late at night, just as I thought I had lost him.

The 34th held on the Kum at Kongju until North Koreans
swung around the exposed left flank and attacked the 63rd

28 General Dean's Story

Field Artillery Battalion on its flank and rear. This forced the

34th to fight a delaying action, facing northwest, just east of

Nonsan.

Now our front was narrowing again, and only the 34th was
still in contact with the enemy. I sent a battalion of the 1 9th
up to give them some added strength, and ordered the units
in contact to try to hold along the curve of a Kum River
tributary north and west of Taejon.

Various officers of the 25th Division already had been up
to look over the front, and I knew that division would come
to help us just as soon as they had secured a vital airfield on
the east coast. The ist Cavalry also was on the way. So I
moved my own divisional command post east to Yongdong
but stayed behind in Taejon myself, working out of the 34th
regimental command post, located in a schoolroom. I had
ordered the 34th to leave the river perimeter on the night of
July 17 but countermanded those orders and decided to try
to hang on to that river line.

My reasons for staying in the town were simple, although
of course there can be much argument about them. (I spent a
great deal of time later trying to second-guess myself about
them.) But these reasons were compounded of poor commu-
nications, which had cost me one valuable position up at
Pyongtaek, and the old feeling that I could do the job better
that is, make the hour-to-hour decisions necessary if I
stayed in close contact with what was happening. My staff
was quite capable of operating the headquarters at Yongdong,
under the direction of Brigadier General Pearson Menoher;
and frankly, it was easier to get a message through toward the
rear (or so it seemed) than toward the front.

None of which changes certain facts: I was forward of my
own headquarters on the night of July 19; the situation was

Men Against Tanks 29

so confused that I could not even be certain we still held a
solid line northwest of the city; and very few important com-
mand decisions were made at that time. Very few of the
things I did in the next twenty-four hours could not have been
done by any competent sergeant and such a sergeant would
have done some of them better. I have no intention of alibiing
my presence in Taejon. At the time I thought it was the place
to be. Three and a half years later I still do not know any
other place I could have been to accomplish any more. The
accomplishments, I think, would have been virtually zero in
any case.

On the night of July 19 I went to sleep to the sound of
gunfire; and in the morning more gunfire knit a ragged and
shrinking border around the city. I am no longer a young
man, and so I awoke very early, although I had been short of
sleep for almost a month. I heard the sound of the sporadic
firing and inhaled the odors which no one ever escapes in
Korea, of rice-paddy muck and mud walls, fertilizer and filth,
and, mixed with them now, the acrid after-odor of cordite
from the artillery, indefinable odors of thatch-roofed houses
slowly burning.

There no longer was any great doubt: my forlorn hope
that the 34th could hold the line long enough for more help to
arrive was growing more forlorn by the minute. Spiteful
rifles of infiltrators and turncoats spat from windows at the
streaming refugees. The doom of Taejon was evident to them,
to the lost and weary soldiers straggling through the town
(the same soldiers who less than a month before had been fat
and happy in occupation billets, complete with Japanese girl
friends, plenty of beer, and servants to shine their boots), and
to me.

Perhaps there is a certain somber poetry to any battle, and

30 General Dean's Story

the phrase, fight and fall back, has a brave sound. But a retreat-
ing army is no place to appreciate poetry; and for the people
doing it day after day, fighting and falling back is a sorry
business. Our first twenty days in Korea had been bone-
wearying and bloody for the soldiers and frustrating for me
(as such a battle must be for any commander who must tell
soldiers when to fall back, when to turn and fight again) . Any
infantry officer must at times be ruthless. Part of the job is to
send men into places from which you know they are not likely
to come out again. This is never easy, but it's an especially
soul-searing business when the only thing you can buy with
other men's lives is a little more time. Sometimes I wonder
now, when so many people are so friendly and kind to me,
whether they realize that they are being land to a man who
has issued such orders in two wars, and to many, many men.

But these are thoughts which come after a battle, not during
it. On that morning in Taejon I remember especially the hour
of six-thirty. It was then that Lieutenant Clarke, whom I had
as an aide partially because he was an aircraft pilot but who
had been doing exactly no flying whatever since we hit Korea,
relayed a report that North Korean tanks had been seen in
Taejon itself, although the battle line was still presumed to be
well north and west.

This was the sort of report with which the whole division
was thoroughly familiar by this time and of which every
man in it was deathly sick. There was only one difference be-
tween this report and many previous ones like it this time
there were no immediate decisions to be made, for the mo-
ment no general officer's work to be done. So we decided to
go tank hunting Clarke, Jimmy Kim, my Korean interpreter,
and I. We couldn't do anything at the moment about the fact
that the 34th's headquarters had lost contact with two of its

Men Against Tanks 3 1

leading battalions and did not know where its flanks were, or
about the war in general. But perhaps we could do something
about a couple of tanks.

We found them easily enough. Two T-34S had come into
an intersection where the east-west road through the city
meets the road from the airfield but they wouldn't be going
away again. Both were dead in the street. Behind them, one
of our own ammunition carriers was burning, with much
phosphorus smoke. A third tank was in a field near some hous-
ing built for dependents of American soldiers during the Ko-
rean occupation. This one appeared to be undamaged. As we
approached it we received one round of high explosive,
although we could not be sure of the source.

A three-quarter-ton truck mounting a 75-millimeter recoil-
less rifle was just backing toward the two dead tanks at the
intersection, but I succeeded in getting the driver's attention
and redirected him to back toward the tank in the field. But
even though we reached a firing position we accomplished
nothing. The gunner either was too nervous or was unfamiliar
with his weapon, and none of the four or five rounds of his
remaining ammunition scored a hit. The truck then pulled
away, but the tank in the field still didn't move. We discov-
ered later in the day that it already had been put out of action,
although it showed no signs of damage.

This whole incident was only a repetition of an old story:
we had nothing with which to fight this or any other tank.
Lieutenant Clarke wrote an independent report of this day's
activities and in it said that we returned to the regimental com-
mand post and ate breakfast. But I must confess I remember
very little about the meal, although shortly food was to mean
more to me than it ever had meant before in my life.

I do remember that after a time we went tank-hunting once

32 General Dean's Story

more, and this time located both a weapon and two more
enemy tanks. The weapon was a bazooka, for which the sol-
dier carrying it had just one remaining round of ammunition.
The two tanks were on the same street as the two dead tanks,
and behind the ammunition carrier, which still was burning.
Our first attempt to get close to them ended abruptly when
we began to receive machine-gun fire just over our heads,
apparently coming from the turrets. We scuttled out of the
line of fire and came up again from behind the buildings along
the side of the street. This time smoke from the burning
trailer and the protection of ruined buildings enabled us to get
within ten or fifteen yards of the street, well behind the tanks.
Just as we did, one of the live tanks managed to turn around in
the narrow street and started back the way it had come into
the town, and the other followed.

This was our day for bad shooting. The bazooka man too
was nervous. His one round was fired at a range of a hundred
yards but fell far short. The last tank rumbled right up to us
and on past, within twenty yards.

There was nothing we could do to stop it. Some people who
escaped from Taejon that day reported that they last had seen
me firing a pistol at a tank. Well, they did, but I'm not proud
of it. As that last tank passed I banged away at it with a .45;
but even then I wasn't silly enough to think I could do any-
thing with a pistol. It was plain rage and frustration just
Dean losing his temper.

After that display of disgust, all I could do was to have
Clarke take a few measurements of treads and armor thickness
on the dead tanks, then return to the regimental command
post and call for an air strike on the fleeing enemy armor, if
the planes could find it. Our withdrawal from the battle of
pistol against tank was punctuated by white phosphorus shells

Men Against Tanks 3 3

exploding from the burning carrier and falling much too close
for comfort.

But we still weren't through with tanks. Very shortly a lone
tank, without infantry support, calmly rumbled through the
town, coming from the direction of Kumsan directly south of
us, and going up toward the front lines to the north and west.
It passed between our command post and the artillery area, not
firing on either one and not being fired upon, waddled all the
way up to the front line, then calmly waddled back again, still
not firing. In passing the command post a second time, that
tanker certainly must have seen more Americans milling
around than he'd ever seen before, but he just kept going.

The only deduction we could make was that this tank must
have come all the way around our left flank, leaving road-
blocks of infantry as he came. I think he then went up to the
battle line to report to his people, "Well, I've got these boys
hooked from the rear now. Come on and make your attack."

In the days before July 20 I was getting intelligence reports
from Korean Army sources and some of my own Korean
agents. My private agents had said days earlier that the Com-
munists would not attempt a direct attack on Taejon but
would move around it to the west and south. It was also re-
ported that civilians in captured areas had been ordered to
make thousands of suits of typical Korean white clothing, in
which North Korean soldiers would infiltrate our lines at
Taejon itself. Then these, plus the turncoats already in the
town, would capture it without a frontal assault.

I discounted this information in preparing for the Taejon
defenses; but there is no denying such thousands of infiltrators
did come into town and confuse the situation. Whether the
final North Korean decision to make a frontal attack was
based on the failure of these infiltrators to drive us out

34 General Dean's Story

entirely, or on such Information as this lone tank could have

provided, is anybody's guess.

At any rate, we decided to chase this tank with a headquar-
ters group, in spite of our previous failures. Clarke, Captain
Richard Rowlands, a division liaison officer, a ROK ordnance
officer, and some casuals from the regimental command post
made up the party. The latter were normally cooks, clerks, or
messengers. On the way to the spot where the lone tank had
last been, reported we located a bazooka man and his ammuni-
tion carrier and a few other soldiers. Clarke's notes show that
we killed some snipers on the way through the town; I think
he's correct, because we certainly received a lot of sniper fire.
I had reason again to note, as in Europe, that American boys
really need to play more cops and robbers, as in the days of
my own youth. They just don't know how to hide themselves
any more, or how to sneak up on an objectivewhether it be
Willie Jones playing cop or a North Korean guerrilla firing
out of a window.

When we located the lone tank it was parked at a business-
area intersection, with two-storied buildings on all sides, per-
haps half a mile south of the command post. The buildings
were set close to the street but were not deep structures, so
that the interior of each block formed a courtyard completely
surrounded by shops and stores.

We approached by entering front doors of stores a block
away from the tank, going through them and out into the
rear-area courtyard, then into back doors of a building only
yards from the quiescent tank. Immediately rifle fire splat-
tered around us. The tankers had some sort of infantry protec-
tion now, and these riflemen had seen us. We withdrew
through the stores to the courtyard, then tried to reach the
street again at a different spot, but again the rifles found us.

Men Against Tanks 3 5

This time I think our position may have been given away by a
fat and stolid Korean woman who calmly stood on the street
outside a building while all this firing was going on. One of
the soldiers wanted to shoot her, but I couldn't be sure enough
that she was a lookout.

Instead we went back to the courtyard once more, and this
rime moved directly behind the building at the corner. Only
this one structure was between us and the tank. To get up-
stairs from the courtyard I had to chin myself on a window
ledge, then clamber up. The bazooka man and I, moving very
cautiously, entered a plastered room, about seven by eight
feet. I think Clarke was in the next room, and others behind us.

Quietly I slipped up beside the street window and looked
around the side of it with one eye directly into the muzzle
of the tank's cannon, no more than a dozen feet away. I could
have spat down the barrel. I signaled to the bazooka man, who
crept up beside me. Then I pointed to a spot just at the base
of the cannon, where the turret and body of the tank joined.

The bazooka went off beside my ear. Plaster cascaded from
the ceiling; onto our heads and around our shoulders. Fumes

C->

from the blast filled the room, and concussion shook the whole
building. From the tank came the most horrible screaming I'd
ever heard (although I did hear its equal later and under dif-
ferent circumstances), but the tank still was not on fire. I
don't think I'm normally a brutal man, but I had just one
idea. I think I said, "Hit them again!" and pointed to a spot
on the other side of the turret. The bazooka fired and more
plaster cascaded, exposing the cornstalks to which most Ko-
rean plaster is stuck. A third time the bazooka fired, and the
screaming finally stopped. Smoke rose from the tank. It was
very quiet in the street.

This was a day in which I had no sense of time. Time got

36 General Dean's Story

lost. Although I hardly had been conscious of any lapse of
hours since early morning, it was almost evening when we
came back to the command post for the last time.

There only details remained to be decided. Colonel Charles
Beauchamp, the regimental commander who had joined us
only three days earlier and had brought the 34th renewed
spirit and fire, had been away from the command post most
of the day, trying to re-establish his communications, so I
issued my orders for evacuation to the executive officer, Lieu-
tenant Colonel Robert L. (Pappy) Wadlington, another of
the old 44th Division officers now fighting a second war with
me. The temporary command of the 34th had fallen on
Wadlington's shoulders when Colonel Martin was killed; and
Pappy lived up to all my expectations. With his supporting
artillery ambushed, he had kept his outfit in hand and fought
a stubborn delaying action back to the Taejon perimeter, at
which time Colonel Beauchamp, an eagle colonel sent from
the yth Division, had taken over.

A counterattack force was organized from kitchen police,
clerks, and messengers when an artillery commander reported
that snipers were preventing him from moving his pieces and
that he might have to pull the breech locks and abandon the
guns, which had happened all too often in the previous couple
of weeks of our retreat. But this time Major S. C. McDaniel
took out his headquarters people and managed to pin down
the snipers until the guns could pull away toward the rear.
This young officer had come to us as a replacement, also from
the yth Division, when Major John J. Dunn, the regimental
operations officer, was reported missing in action at the same
time Colonel Martin was killed at Chonan. I felt certain that
Dunn had been killed too, but learned later that he was seri-
ously wounded and captured. McDaniel had taken over a diffi-

Men Against Tanks 3 7

cult position and had impressed me by his ability and out-
standing courage. Later on July 20 he too was captured. I've
learned from returning prisoners of war that he was relentless
in his efforts to protect the rights of his fellow prisoners,
despite the repeated threats of his Communist captors. He was
so adamant that he finally was taken away from the prison
camp, and his fellow prisoners are convinced that he was
murdered.

All day Captain Raymond D. Hatfield, the division trans-
portation officer, had been worrying about his supply train.
We had a rolling supply pointthat is, virtually all of our
ammunition and supplies were kept on a train, so that they
could be pulled out fast when we needed to retreat again, as
we had from front-line points farther north. Hatfield was
trying to get the train out of Taejon toward Yongdong, but
reported that Korean engineers had uncoupled the locomotive
and fled with it.

Fortunately my telephone line to division headquarters was
still open, and division promised to send a locomotive back
to Taejon. Hatfield went down to the railroad yard to meet
it, but soon returned, almost beside himself. The locomotive
had come clear into the yards, then suddenly backed away
again at full speed.

Once more we called headquarters. They told us a sniper
had killed the engineer and the locomotive had been taken
out by the fireman, but they would send it in once more, with
a carload of troops for protection. The last I saw of Hatfield
(who really belonged at division headquarters, not up here in
the burning town) was when he made another trip toward the
railroad yard, still refusing to leave until the train did.

I added his name to a list I had been keeping. That day I had
listed about fifteen names of men to whom I intended to award

38 General Dean's Story

medals the moment I got a chance Bronze or Silver Stars for
gallantly or heroic action. I even had a dozen actual medals-
all the Bronze Stars the Eighth Army possessed at the moment
in my jeep, so that I could pin them on personally and on
the spot. I knew I had been far too chary about awarding
medals in World War II, and it hadn't been fair to the men.
This time I wasn't going to hand them out like rations, but I
didn't intend to make the same mistake over again.

Captain Hatfield never got out of Taejon. When American
troops retook the town, much later, his body was found. He
had been wounded, then bayoneted. I have recommended
since my return to this country that he be awarded post-
humously a Silver Star for heroic action. Most of the other
men whose names were put on my list that day never did get
their awards. I hung on to the list, but rain obliterated
the names during the subsequent days and weeks. Three years
later I couldn't remember them nor learn who the men had
been. I saw my jeep again, under curious circumstances, but 1
have no idea what happened to the medals that were in it.

Just about dusk, light tanks from the ist Cavalry Division,
on temporary assignment to us, came up from the rear, and
we organized a column of vehicles the first of the regimental
headquarters to start out under their protection. But only
moments after they left the schoolhouse, we heard them in a
fire fight near the center of town.

Shortly afterward Pappy Wadlington suggested that it was
time for us to go too. He showed me a last message he pro-
posed to send to division headquarters, but I rewrote it because
I thought it sounded, in his version, too much like asking
rescue for me personally. As a substitute I wrote: "Enemy
roadblock eastern exit Taejon. Send armor immediately.
Dean."

Men Against Tanks 39

In Europe I had ordered a lot of stations closed, without
minding. This time I minded. If I had realized that this was
the last formal order I was to issue for three years, perhaps I
might have phrased It better one of those ringing things that
somebody would remember. But I didn't know then, and now
I can't think of anything better to have said.

We organized the remaining miscellaneous headquarters
vehicles into a rough column and started out toward the east,
the way the previous column had gone with the tanks. As we
pulled through the city we ran into the tail of this column,
which had been ambushed. Some trucks were on fire, others
slewed across a narrow street where buildings on both sides
were flaming for a block or more. Our own infantry, on one
side of the street, was in a vicious fire fight with enemy units
in higher positions on the other side.

We drove through, careening between the stalled trucks.
It was a solid line of fire, an inferno that seared us in spite of
our speed. A block farther on my jeep and an escort jeep
roared straight past an intersection, and almost immediately
Clarke, riding with me, said we had missed a turn. But rifle
fire still poured from buildings on both sides, and turning
around was out of the question. I looked at a map and decided
we should go on ahead, south and east, on another road that
might let us make more speed than the truck- jammed main
escape route. I had been away from my headquarters too long,
and had to get back very soon. So we bored down the road
in the general direction of Kumsan, "while snipers still chewed
at us from both sides of the road.

We were all by ourselves.

CHAPTER III

The Lonesome Mountains

Our jeeps tried to barrel through the snipers' fire, but it
blocked us time after time. At one spot, a truck lay partially
on its side in a ditch with the driver slumped in his seat. We
stopped and I ran over. The driver was dead, but under the
truck were a couple of men talking to each other about sur-
rendering. One said, "We might as well surrender. There
isn't any use in this."

There were some walking wounded here too, and I filled
my jeep with them, then started talking to the men under the
truck. A Communist showed himself in silhouette on top of a
hill, so I grabbed an M-i and fired. I used to be good with a
Springfield, but I hate to admit that I'm no great shakes with
an M-i. I don't know whether I hit this man, but he dropped
and the sniper fire let up a little. I signaled to Clarke in my
jeep and to the escort jeep now filled with casuals or wound-
ed mento go on; and the two men who had been cowering
under the truck came out to join me.

I had hoped that there would be no more vehicles on this
wrong road, but an artillery half-track rumbled up. I think
that was the most heavily loaded vehicle I ever saw. It was so
crammed with men that we couldn't get in we just got on,
hanging by precarious toe- and hand-holds.

We rumbled ahead and presently caught up with my jeeps.

40

The Lonesome Mountains 41

They had been blocked and abandoned at a spot where the
road made a slight S-bend as it approached a river and bridge.
Here the Communists had set up a roadblock. Riflemen were
along the S itself and at the left of the road, and apparently a
machine gun was emplaced behind one of our wrecked vehi-
cles at the bridge. Heavy fire swept the raised road, from in
front of us and on the left side.

We tumbled off the road embankment into a ditch at the
right for protection. Here I realized that I no longer had any
weapon. I had left the M-i on the half-track when I jumped
for the ditch; my pistol had been lost somewhere, and the
holster dangled empty at my hip.

Clarke was in the ditch with several other men. He had been
an air officer, but now he showed infantry ability. When 1
asked him to make an informal muster, he counted seventeen
Americans and a terrified Korean civilian who spoke English
and later told me he had once worked for the U. S. State
Department in Seoul.

We started crawling away from the road the Communist
fire covered, around a small house, and through a bean or
sweet potato field. On the way the little Korean, something of
a dandy from his appearance, fell up to his armpits in a honey
(fertilizer) pit and was absolutely speechless thereafter. We
reached the bank of the river, well away from the bridge, and
lay there in a semicircle, waiting. I remember delivering a
small lecture to the men about keeping off the ridge lines,
about using their halizone tablets to purify the river water with
which they were filling their canteens (neither Clarke nor I
had one), and about patience. I said that we'd have to wait
until full dark to go on, and that patience was very important.
A couple of years later, I wondered a time or two just how
patient a man was required to be.

42 General Dean's Story

The group had only a few arms of assorted kinds. Clarke,
who had been hit in the shoulder, insisted that I take his
pistol. "I can't use it anyhow," he said.

Our bank of the river was low, but a mountain rose directly
from the other side. Our plan was to cross here where the
Communist fire did not bar the river to us, then swing over
the mountain and down to the highway again beyond the
roadblock. In full dark we got across, wading, and started
climbing the steep, unstable slope. It was rough going. I was
leading, and presently Clarke worked his way up to me and
said, "We have a badly wounded man behind us."

Clarke and I went back to help the wounded man, who was
hit in both legs, and Captain Rowlands, the liaison officer who
had been with us on the tank hunt earlier in the day, took the
lead.

I had carefully planned the withdrawal from Taejon to
include the blowing of bridges and tunnels at exactly the
right time. Rowlands and only Rowlandswas to have given
the word to demolition squads, but he didn't reach any com-
munications for three or four days, so as far as I know the
demolition charges never were fired. That's the sort of thing
that happens to careful planning during a retreat.

Two soldiers already were carrying the wounded man.
Another man staggered along beside them. At the first oppor-
tunity Clarke used his first-aid kit to bind the man's leg
wounds, although his own shoulder still had not been treated.

This was sandy soil, very loose, and it was difficult for two
men to carry another between them. I said, "Hell, get
this man up on my shoulders. I can carry him more easily that
way by myself."

But Dean is always forgetting how old he is. That one-man
carry didn't last long. The soldier was too heavy for me, and

The Lonesome Mountains 43

I was almost falling on my face. We went back to the two-
man carry, and even then it seemed as If my turn came around
every five minutes.

It was pitch-dark, and we were trying to move with as
little noise as possible, to avoid stirring up North Korean
patrols. The main group ahead kept moving too fast, away
from us, simply because they had no way of telling that we
weren't right behind them. The man we were carrying be-
came more or less delirious; he drank all the available water
and then called for more. We only hoped we knew where
the party ahead was going; we kept struggling to catch up, but
we had to stop for rest very often.

During one of the rest stops I thought I heard water run-
ning, just off the ridge to one side I was sure I heard it. I
started off in that direction, and the next thing I knew I was
running down a slope so steep that I could not stop.

I plunged forward and fell.

A statement by Lieutenant Clarke about these events
declared, in part: "About twelve, midnight, the general told
me he was going down [the hillside] for water. I wouldn't let
him and told him that we had seen North Koreans [by
presumption] tracking us to the base of the hill, and we could
assume they were still there. Also told Mm that there probably
was a stream on the other side of the hill.

"The next day i: 15 a.m. while leading the patrol, I found
no one was following me, and no noise to the rear. So
I returned to find five men asleep on the ground. I called for
the general, and one of the men answered that he had gone
for water. As I figured the round trip could be made in an
hour, I set the goal of two hours as the maximum time that
we could wait. The general didn't take a canteen or a helmet,

44 General Dean's Story

so I assumed he was going to try to find some stragglers rather
than to get water. At 3 : 1 5 a.m. I woke the men and we headed
to the top of the hill, arriving just before dawn. . . . Just
as it was beginning to get light, I had the men spread oat and
posted two as guards for one-hour shifts. I figured we'd at
least be able to see what killed us, as we had no weapons. I no
sooner posted the guards when I checked and found them
asleep. I awoke them and asked them if they wanted to be
killed. I don't remember their exact answers, but they were to
the effect that they didn't care whether they were killed or
not. So 1 stood guard until they woke up. At daylight I
searched the area with my field glasses, saw that our vehicles
[the ones abandoned on the road the night before] were gone,
and three Koreans were sitting on top of a hill to the northeast
of us. We spent the day where we were, on top of the hill.
It was scorching hot. We had the shade only of a few bushes
about a foot high. During the day the men almost turned
against me because I wouldn't let them start off until it got
dark. As it did begin to get dark we started south along the
ridge until we reached a cliff at the southern end. At this
point we walked around the top of a ledge, about six feet
wide, and then slid down a slope. . . ."

The remainder of the statement details his party's further
experiences in getting back to the U.S. lines, which they
reached two days later, on July 23.

When I awoke I had no idea how long I had been knocked
out, and at first didn't realize that I had a gash on my head.
But when I tried to rise on my hands and knees I found I had
a broken shoulder. My abdomen where I'd had an operation
a year before hurt fearfully. I was dazed and groggy. I looked

The Lonesome Mountains 45

at niy watch, which read twelve-thirty a.m. or that's what
I thought it said, although now I believe it must have been
later. I was down in a dry creek bed with very steep sides;
and all I could think of was, "My God, what's happened to
those people up there? I don't know where I am."

I don't think I had walked more than twenty yards or so
from the rest of the party, but I couldn't tell how far my in-
voluntary run had taken me, or how far I'd rolled in my fall.
I've tried dozens of times to reconstruct that run and fall in
my mind, but I simply don't know how it happened. My
present guess is that I was a hundred yards down the hill-
not a cliff, but a very steep, sandy slope.

I heard water again, and I needed it badly. I crawled along
the dry stream bottom and finally found a trickle oozing out
of the rocks. I scooped out a hollow with my hands, and when
it filled with water I stuck my face down in the dirty puddle
and drank, not worrying at all about halizone tablets. I remem-
ber that I then started back up the barren hillside, perhaps on
my hands and knees or just scrabbling, but I don't know what
happened next.

I must have passed out again, because when I regained con-
sciousness I was lying on my side and an eight- or ten-man
North Korean patrol was moving no more than ten yards
from me. This was false dawn, just a faint glow over the east-
ern hills; but even in the improved light they failed to see me.
I can't imagine why they missed me, but they kept right on
going, scrambling up that steep incline like so many mountain
goats, in the same direction that I had been headed.

I thought, "Oh-oh, this is the end for Clarke and the others.
They're gone now." That was the lowest moment I've ever
had in my life. I could see all those people on the hill being

46 General Dean's Story

killed; and the realization that Clarke didn't even have a pistol
I had hismade me feel even worse. But there was absolutely
nothing I could do about it.

I was also tortured by the thought, not new, that I should
have done something about him earlier. Both Clarke and my
other aide, Captain David Bissett, were married men with
young children; and ever since we had come to Korea I had
been trying to figure out some way to fire both of them with-
out hurting their feelings. They were good aides and good
officers, but my experience with aides and drivers for division
commanders in wartime is that they are very likely to get
killed. I felt I shouldn't have men with young children taking
the risks they had to take. I had been able to keep Bissett at
headquarters most of the time, although he was thoroughly
angry with me and even had told me, "General, I don't appre-
ciate this. Why can't I have a company?"

But I had not done anything else about relieving either of
them, and now I thought, "Well, Clarke's gone; and if I don't
get back to headquarters myself, Bissett will ask for a line
company for sure, and probably get killed too." They were
both very fine men, and I'd never been so proud of Clarke as
in the last few hours when he'd been organizing that column
and keeping people together.

When the North Koreans were out of sight I crawled back
to the trickle of water and drank again. I was dead tired, but
I thought, "Oh-oh, I can't stay here. Other people may know
about this waterhole." So I crawled up into some bushes
fifteen or twenty feet away from it, just as daylight was com-
ing on, and stayed there all day, only about half-conscious.
I could hear trucks and people over on the highway we had
left, a lot of noise, as if the Communists might be working on
their vehicles, and some firing.

The Lonesome Mountains 47

As soon as darkness came I started out again, first crawling
back up the hillside, then along the top of the ridge, without
seeing any sign of the party I'd lost the night before or of the
Communist patrol of the morning. My shoulder was useless,
so scrambling up the hill was difficult; on the top I was able
to stagger along more easily. Then the ridge suddenly ended
in a sheer cliff. A trail zigzagged down, but it was extremely
steep, almost a hand-hold trail, and I had great difficulty with
it. Walking itself seemed to do something to my insides; and
it was especially hard for me to get to my feet after I had
been sitting or lying down to rest.

Working at it a long time, I finally managed to get down
about ten feet on the trail, where it flattened out in an escarp-
ment, a sort of shelf on the side of the mountain. The trail
went along it for a short distance, then dived another ten
feet down to a second shelf. These ten-foot slopes were mur-
der to get down. I barely managed to reach the foot of the
second when rain started to pour down, as I think it can rain
nowhere except in Korea. It came in torrents, and I was almost
overcome by the desire for something to drink. There had
been no water on top of the ridge. I found a big flat rock,
perhaps six feet across, sticking up a foot above the ground
level. I wanted to keep going but couldn't make it just then,
so I lay down beside the rock and stretched my handkerchief
out on top of it in the pouring rain. When it got soaked with
water, I squeezed it out into my mouth, a few drops at a time.
I think I spent most of the night doing that, instead of moving
on toward our lines.

I was still lying there in the morning when I heard a noise,
something scrambling down the same path I had used. I got
around behind the rock and pulled my pistol, just in case it
might be a North Korean.

48 General Dean's Story

But the man who lurched into view was a young American.
He had not seen me yet he was too busy making his way
down that brutal pathwhen I called to him. "Who are you? 11
I said. "What outfit are you from?"

He jumped when he heard me but sighed with relief when
he got a look and saw that I too was an American. He said,
"I'm Lieutenant Tabor Stanley Tabor from the Nineteenth
Infantry. Who are you?"

I tried to get up from behind my rock but had trouble.
Then I said, "Well, I'm the S.O.B. who's the cause of all this
trouble."

Tabor said he had been with Easy Company of the znd
Battalion, which I had thrown into the river perimeter to
bolster up the 34th's strength. In the retreat he'd been cut off
and had started walking south by himself.

We started walking again that morning, Tabor carrying his
carbine and I with Clarke's pistol banging against my leg.
I've enjoyed walking all my life and usually can outwalk
many young people. But not on this day. I had to keep stop-
ping to rest because of the pain under my ribs and in my
abdomen. I just wanted to sit down. After each rest Tabor
would pull me to my feet, and we'd make a few more yards.

I said, "You go on ahead. One person can get through a lot
quicker. I'm stove up, and there's no use pooping around
here."

But he always would say, "No, two have a better chance,"
and would refuse to leave me.

About one o'clock that afternoon we found the highway
again. But it was bordered by open fields, and every time we'd
try to cross we would see vehicles or soldiers of the Inmun
Gun (North Korean term for "People's Army"). So we kept
heading south through the brush, toward Kumsan, waiting for

The Lonesome Mountains 49

an opportunity to turn toward the east, in the direction of
Yongdong, where I had left division headquarters.

That afternoon we stumbled into a family of refugees from
Taejon, a mother and two teen-aged sons who had strung a
rude tentjust a piece of canvas, really beside a stream. None
of them could speak English, but they gave us some of their
rice and made us understand that we should stay out of sight
under the canvas until dark. We got the idea that there were
many North Koreans in the area, but none of them bothered
us.

Both of us got some sleep. When we awakened we asked the
family if they would guide us toward Yongdong that evening.
They made us understand that this town more than twenty
miles east of Taejon had also been captured by the Commu-
nists. The military situation, then, was in even worse shape
than I had feared. We had to assume this news was true; and
if it was, Tabor and I were in a bad spot. I knew it would be
terribly hard to get all the way east to Kumchon, which
would be the next logical place for division headquarters to
move if Yongdong was lost. We would have to pass through
a defile; and the hill country around Yongdong always had
been full of Communists. Even in the occupation days hunt-
ers passed up this fine deer country because of the many
guerrillas.

So I said, " We'll have to head south toward Kumsan, then
try to get to Chinan, and east toward Taegu." In other
words, I thought we'd make a big swing south, then cut to
the east well below the main invasion route. This was to be
my general plan for a long time.

That evening we started south again. There were no stars
or other guideposts for holding our direction, and we didn't
make much time. This was on the evening of July 22, and I

50 General Dean's Story-

guess my various injuries affected my mind, because the next
days are more or less a blank. I know we had no food and
that we did keep going, but the rest is just a haze of weariness,
trying to get to my feet and failing without help, and ever-
lastingly stumbling along one trail after another. Tabor must
have kept us both going by will power, because I don't
remember having any.

This may have gone on for one day or three. At last we
reached a small town. I think we had turned around somehow
and were heading west rather than south. This village may
have been near Chinsan. At any rate we stumbled into it, and
within a few minutes the whole population was around us.
We asked for food, and someone brought us water with some
kind of uncooked grain ground up in it. I've never seen or
heard of it elsewhere. They also gave each of us two raw eggs.
Two men in the crowd spoke some English, one of them well
and one just a few words. The people seemed friendly, so we
asked about where the Inmun Gun was, and whether they
would guide us to Taegu. I offered them a million 'won
(approximately $i 100 the exchange then was about 860 to i)
if they would take us through. Even when Koreans speak
English well, they often confuse figures, so I drew the figure
in the dirt.

We should have noticed that the man who spoke better
English had disappeared, but we didn't. The one who spoke
less well said, "Okay, okay, come with me." He indicated that
we should come to his house to get some rest, and that he
would take us to Taegu in the morning. Fie led us to a house
at the far edge of the village, where we took off our boots
and entered an unfurnished room. The Korean sat on the
floor with us and in his very broken English asked whom the
village people should support. He diagrammed it: the Amcr-

The Lonesome Mountains 5 1

leans pushing one way, the North Koreans the other. It was
all very confusing, he Indicated, and I'm afraid we didn't help
his confusion much. Instead we went to sleep on the floor.

Several hours laterit must have been early in the morning
we heard a rifle shot just outside the house. At the sound
that little Korean never hesitated. He went out a door like a
rabbit out of a box. He was gone, without any preliminaries.

Outside a voice called, "Come out, Americans! Come out!
We will not kill you. We are members of the People's Army.
Corne out, Americans!" The English was the best that I'd
heard a Korean speak.

Tabor said, "This is it," and reached for his carbine.

We didn't "come out." I said to Tabor, "Come on, get
your boots on, in a hurry," and we both did. We left by an-
other door away from both the rifle shot and the door the
Korean had used, and jumped into some high weeds right
beside the house.

"I'll lead," I said as we started crawling up a little hill in
the dark. "With the carbine, you can cover me better than
I can cover you with a pistol. I'll be the point." I remember
I also said, "I'm not going to surrender, Tabor. There won't
be any surrender for me."

"That's the way I feel too," he said.

There were more shots. They heard us in the weeds and
fired in that direction. We reversed our course and went right
back through the village, which was In pandemonium, every-
body in the street and everybody yelling. We went right
through town, past those Korean civilians, but none of them
did anything. Crossing back-lots and skirting around houses,
we finally came out in a rice paddy at the other edge of town.
These paddies are divided into small cells, perhaps thirty feet
across, with high dikes between. The water was about four

5 2 General Dean's Story

inches deep and the rice stuck up another four or five inches.

We dived into the rice and the water, crawling on our
bellies, using our elbows to inch us forward in the old infan-
try fashion. Two soldiers were across the paddy on a dike;
they did not see us at first. I led out in the crawling, crossing
one cell, then scooting over a dike and into the next, while
the soldiers wearing Inmun Gun uniforms, I think con-
tinued to search from their vantage point on a parallel dike.

We crossed three of these cells, with the intervening dikes.
Tabor was still with me. Then I went over another dike and
crawled some more, but when I looked back, Tabor was not
behind me and I was not to see another American for three
long years.

During the thirty-five days I spent in the hills of South
Korea several subjects cluttered my mind: food, inability to
tell time of day or day of month, worry over my friends and
aides, and the frantic necessity for getting back to United
Nations lines with new information I had gathered about the
enemy. These varied in importance from day to day, but all
of them were there, all the time. So was an hour-to-hour,
day-to-day concern about a pistol and just twelve rounds of
.45 ammunition. Those twelve rounds were the most impor-
tant in the world, because they were all I had.

While I lay in that rice paddy waiting for Tabor to catch
up with me, I thought the time had come when I'd have to
use that ammunition. I couldn't imagine what had happened
to the lieutenant. We'd been doing very well, inching for-
ward on our elbows and bellies, and there had been no sounds
of firing or pursuit. Finally I crawled onto the edge of the
paddy, where only a dike separated the rice land from a
stream and a path beside it. Still he hadn't caught up.

The Lonesome Mountains 53

I called, "Tabor! Tabor!" The only answer was from one
of the Communist soldiers on a nearby dike. He fired at the
sound of my voice. I clung to the ground and took out the
pistol, getting ready to use It. I knew that I'd see the soldier's
silhouette on the dike in the dim pre-dawn light before he
could see me. But he must also have realized this, because he
never came closer. I waited quite a long time, then called,
"Tabor! Tabor!" once more. Again, shots were my answer.
After half an hour with nothing whatever happening, I
crawled back to look over into the last paddy cell we had
crossed together; but Tabor wasn't there either.

It was almost full daylight now, and my advantage over
the Communists hunting me was gone. I felt like a sheep-
stealing dog, but I had to go on. I crawled along the path
beside the stream and finally found some foxholes, evidently
dug by Communists for a roadside ambush. I was still within
hearing distance of the village, but I figured that the last place
pursuers would look for me would be in one of their own
foxholes. I crawled down into one, past drying watermelon
rinds the former owners had thrown out from some feast they
had held while waiting for somebody to ambush.

I have never figured out what could have happened to
Tabor that morning. It's difficult to keep going in a straight
line when you're crawling with heads down, as we were, and
the paddy cells were oddly shaped, never square. He may
simply have become confused and changed direction, losing
sight of me, then was unable to find me where I stopped
beside the path. It's also possible that he dropped into one of
the drainage or fertilizer holes which are in nearly every rice-
paddy cell. For a day or so previous to this, we had been
arguing a little about these. Tabor thought we should come
down to the paddies, using the holes to hide In when neces-

54 General Dean's Story

sary; but I had vetoed the Idea, insisting that the only way
to get anywhere in Korea is to keep to the high ground. It
could be that he merely decided, once we were separated, to
use his own judgment. However, I am convinced that he lost
direction while crawling.

I learned in 1953 that Tabor had been brought into a
prisoner-of-war stockade at Taejon on August 4, 1950. Our
flight from the village was in the early hours of July 25 or
July 26, so I don't believe he was captured that day. The
village people certainly would not have waited so long to
turn him over to the nearest Communist headquarters for
whatever reward was then being offered for lieutenants. I
think he may have remained free several days after we lost
each other, but no positive check is possible. He was in such
bad shape when taken prisoner that he finally died, from mal-
nutrition and pneumonia. Returning prisoners in 1953 told
the story of his death to his wife, whom he had married three
months before going to Korea, and also relayed his report of
having been with me for two weeks in the hills. Actually our
time together was two or three days, not weeks; but the story
had passed through many hands before it came back to me.

I'm still heartsick about him. Perhaps I should have gone
back even farther that morning in the paddies, but I don't
think I could have found him. My recommendation that he
be awarded a Silver Star for his disregard of his personal
safety in staying with me was made after my return to this
country.

No sooner had I dropped into that foxhole by the roadside
than I saw a farmer carrying a little girl, about three years
old, on his back. Thank God he was not coming from the
direction of the village; presumably he did not know about
the hue and cry for me. He definitely saw me, so there was

The Lonesome Mountains 5 5

no point In trying to hide. I tried for the first time what was
to become a regular practice when your hiding place in
Korea is discovered, ask for food.

I got out of the hole and made signs. The word pop, made
with a sharper sound than in English, means rice in Korean.
I said, "Pop," and placed a hand on my stomach.

It worked. He made signs that I was to get back down in
the hole and stay there, then went on. In about an hour he
came back with a big bowl of rice, more than I could eat.
After I had my fill I tore off the North Korean part of a
map I had in my pocket (not being at all interested in North
Korea just then) and wrapped what was left of the rice in it.

Then I crouched in the foxhole and took out the pistol
again. When I tried to fire it, empty, nothing happened,
which gave me special cold chills as I remembered my plan
to use it against the soldier on the dike a couple of hours
earlier. I spent the day stripping it all the way down, cleaning
it as best I could of the rnud and water it had picked up,

I had the twelve rounds of ammunition and the two clips.
Then and later, I was torn by indecision: Fd burnish those
shells every day, but I never could make up my mind per-
manently which was the better way to keep them. Should I
have one shell always in the pistol chamber, and the other
clip full that is, carrying eight rounds not worrying about
the three remaining shells? Or should I put six shells in each
clip and depend on having time to change clips in the midst
of a fight? Neither system suited me, really, because neither
could insure that I'd be able to use eleven for knocking out
Communists and one for knocking out Dean. I figured this
last was essential. Even if I could have stomached the idea
personally, I knew that I couldn't afford to surrender, because
of my rank. The Communists would be sure to capitalize on

56 General Dean's Story

the surrender of a general, just as we had in Europe. They
might even put out the information that I had gone over to
their side, and there wouldn't be anything that I could do
about it. I remembered that in Europe we had captured a
German SS general who got lost in a retreat; and immediately
our propaganda people had made capital out of him, telling
the Germans in leaflets and broadcasts that he was just smart,
he'd realized it was "a quarter to twelve" and had surrendered
deliberately. That was not going to happen to Dean not if
bullet number twelve could prevent it.

I stayed in the foxhole all that day. Toward evening the
farmer came back with more rice. When I showed him the
rice I'd saved he grimaced and threw it away. When you
want to keep cooked rice, you wrap it in a cloth so that it
can "breathe." Wrapped in a tight paper, it sours within
hours. I was to learn a lot about rice, and that was the first
lesson.

After dark I left the foxhole and started walking again,
still holding to my project of going south to get out of the
way of the main troop movements, then east toward Taegu.
I kicked myself for being without a compass. Traveling only
at night, I could not use the sun effectively to check my direc-
tion; and the old Boy Scout system of getting a bearing from
a watch was no good to me. My watch had stopped days
before. Most nights the stars were obscured, and I had to go
by guess-reckoning, which was often wrong. I think I made
almost a complete circle during the next three nights, accom-
plishing nothing.

The only thing was, I did feel better. I could get up by
myself now; and dysentery, which had bothered me during
the first twenty days in Korea, was gone. In fact, my elimi-
nation came to a complete stop for thirty-two days. I thought

The Lonesome Mountains 57

I was a medical curiosity, but when I told my story years
later in a Tokyo hospital nobody was impressed. Army doc-
tors said anything under a hundred days was nothing to brag
about. Nevertheless Fm still amazed.

On the night of what I think was August i, I started walk-
ing early. I was up in the mountains by this time. I was mak-
ing distance every night, and I thought, "All's well. Ill get
through."

I was on a ridge, approaching what I think must have been
Kuinsan, although I wasn't coming from the proper direction.
I seemed to be traveling east, from the direction of Chinsan,
rather from the south. That was what made me certain I must
have been going in a circle. In the early evening I passed some
women working In the fields. As I went by I noticed that a
little boy of about nine left them and was following me. 1
went over a rise and slipped into some bushes, sure that I had
eluded him. After some time I came out again and reached
a hill overlooking the town. From my vantage point I picked
out a house detached from the others and decided that when
full dark came I would go there and ask for food. I had not
eaten since the farmer gave me rice on July 25 or 26.

For some reason not clear now, I was quite certain the
people in this particular house would feed me. But just as I
got to my feet to go down and try my panhandling, a youth
carrying a rifle came out and started running up the hill-
running like mad. Pretty soon another came out and also ran
up the hill. I thought it fortunate that I had waited as long
as I had to case the town. Then at least three more youths
ran out of other houses farther down the street. I couldn't
tell whether they were armed, but none was in uniform. They
all were heading more or less away from me. I hunched down
In the bushes and was just about to congratulate myself on

5 8 General Dean's Story

my hiding place when I heard a rustling behind me and here
was this nine-year-old, pointing" down at me and trying to
signal to the men. He wasn't more than a couple of yards
from me.

I lunged at him, and I'm afraid I wasn't very pleasant. I
really cussed him out. He turned and ran; and I crawled out
of there fast and went the other way. There was shooting all
around me, and bullets clipped the bushes above my head.
Somebody yelled as If he'd been hit, but Dean was on his
way.

When I'd come to Korea I had hoped I soon would be a
grandfather, but I didn't feel grandfatherly then. If I could,
I'd have wrung that moth-eaten little buzzard's neck.

CHAPTER IV

The Capture

So I still had nothing to eat. I walked on through the night.

On the trail the next day I met a Korean man. Again there
was no chance for concealment, so I walked up boldly and
asked him for food. This time my system didn't work. He
would have nothing to do with me, turning abruptly and
walking away as if I didn't exist. I was worried for a while
after that, but there were no sounds of pursuit. I decided he
probably had told no one of meeting me. I think now this
was a typical Korean act: to do nothing, to take no respon-
sibility. If he had either fed me or reported me he would have
been personally involved and that's usually the last thing any
Korean wants. I've been told that this fear of personal respon-
sibility accounts for the fact that most Koreans will walk
around a person dying in the street without making any at-
tempt to give aid. So long as they act as if the dying person
didn't exist, or the accident had not happened, they person-
ally aren't responsible for it.

By that night hunger was beginning to be a vital problem.
When I spotted some smoke rising I figured there must be
a village near and I worked down toward it cautiously, re-
membering the small boy of the day before. It was a good
thing I did. Just after I had scooted across a high-way I saw
at least ten big North Korean tanks rumbling through that

59

60 General Dean's Story

village, heading south. This was obviously a main highway,
and that village was no place for me.

I got better at sleeping by daylight and traveling by night,
but I still wasn't making much progress. Those mountain
trails wind around so in the ridges that you walk miles to
make what is a short distance in a straight line. I was walking
more easily now; although my abdomen still hurt and I
couldn't raise my left arm. I wasn't sufferingexcept from
hunger.

By this time I had changed my first objective to Chonju,
even farther south and slightly west of Kumsan. My reason-
ing was that some South Korean officials just might be left
in that town, with some sort of transport. Perhaps I could
get a ride to Taegu, or even along the extreme southern route
all the way to Pusan.

The ridge trails were such slow going that I began to get
down on the roads more often. When I'd approach a village
in the early evening or late in the morning I'd leave the road
and circle around the village through the hills, although this
had to be done without trails in most instances. It was frus-
trating and took endless time.

About three nights after my experience with the small boy
I started walking in the early evening and saw a village ahead.
It was still light and I should have started another circle, but
I was a little overconfident and stayed on the road.

Then I met another little boy. This one was five or six
years old. As soon as he saw me he turned tail and ran back
to the village screaming as if his end had come.

Well, I knew what that would mean. Instead of turning
off the road, I hurried after him, almost running myself. Close
by the first houses I jumped off the road into a ditch and a
bunch of weeds.

The Capture 61

Sure enough, here came all the males in town. I noticed
only one rifle and one burp gun, but a number of the other
men had bamboo spears. They all followed the little boy back
along the road to the point where he had seen me I could
see the little devil pointing out the exact spot-then spread
out and began the hunt.

Fortunately for me, this town was huddled between a hill
on one side and some kaffir fields (maize) on the other.
Beyond the kaffir was a stream. I crawled through the fields
to the stream, walked along its bed in the same direction I
had been going previously until I was well past the town,
then came back up on the road. The last I saw of that place,
the men were still beating through the weeds with their guns
and spears, and all the women were standing out on the main
street waiting for somebody to bring me in.

I still didn't like little boys, Korean variety.

Thereafter, whenever I came on a village in the middle of
the night, I just walked right through it, paying no attention
to the dozens of dogs barking at me. Even when it was pitch-
black I had no trouble knowing the villages were there. You
always can smell a Korean town before you see it. You al-
ways can recognize the police stations too, because they're
all built alike: a big stone wall, perhaps eight feet high,
around a compound, double wooden gates at the front, and
a twenty-foot round stone tower, like a silo, somewhere in-
side. Usually, I just ignored them. But one dark night when
I was hiking along a rather good road, by Korean standards,
someone challenged me from the shadows just as I passed the
gates of the town jailhouse. He yelled one word, which must
have meant "Halt!" from a spot no more than eight feet
away.

I had no previous warning that he was there, and he startled

6 2 General Dean's Story

me. He did more than that. He scared me half to death, and
made me mad too at myself for being careless and at him for
being alive. I was so flustered that I did a foolish thing. I
whirled and yanked out my pistol and walked right into him.
He was just a youngster, I think, armed with a rifle that had
a long thin Russian-type bayonet on it. I shoved my pistol
right in his guts, hard, and he backed up. I backed him right
into the gate. He was so surprised that he didn't do anything.

Just as he got inside the gate I turned and walked very fast
in the same direction I had been going. It was only a few
yards to the corner of this jailhouse compound. Here I turned
to the left, ran along the wall all the way to the rear of the
compound, turned left again along the back wall of the com-
pound, made one more left turn, and came back to the road
on the side of the compound from which I had come origi-
nally. I waited there to see what would happen.

Inside the compound there was a lot of yelling as soon as
the guard recovered enough to give the alarm, and a whole
squad, some in uniform, some in civvies, poured out into the
road and headed the way the guard had seen me go. As soon
as I saw the direction they were taking, I walked back up the
road on which I had entered the town. I'd noticed a Y fork
off the main highway a short distance before I hit the town.
I went back to it and took the other arm of the Y in the
same general direction I wanted but not on the highway. I
never did get back to that highway again.

The only explanation I have for the guard's failure to act
is that he was just rushed off his feet. If he'd ever lifted that
damned rifle to his shoulder I would have had to kill him
right there. But he didn't. When I thought about it later, I
could see that what I'd done was a fine way to get killed for
sure but that one time the bluff worked.

The Capture 63

I had one other close call, also in the middle of a black
night. This time I stumbled into a town before I'd noticed,
and again was in front of a police station. There had been a
guard post in the road, I guess, and I walked right into a little
charcoal fire they'd left burning. I don't know where the
people were, and the only thing I could do was to keep on
walking. I guess they never saw or heard rne, because noth-
ing happened.

None of the village dogs really bothered me. But up in the
mountains, miles from anywhere, the big dogs kept by the
charcoal burners around their huts sounded so ferocious, so
bloodthirsty, that I stayed away from those huts even though
I now needed food badly. Those dogs sounded as if they were
quite capable of tearing me apart. I also wanted to avoid the
charcoal people. Many of them had been Communist sym-
pathizers and outcasts even in the old days, and I was afraid
to trust them. I think now this was a mistake; but at the time
I didn't feel that I could take the chance.

By this time my equipment was getting in very bad shape.
I was wearing an oversized pair of coveralls which I had
got in exchange for my combat suit, too small for me, from
a forward air observer at Okchon a few days before Taejon
fell. These coveralls were quite cumbersome and bulky and
had to be stripped off entirely when I forded a stream. My
combat boots also were the worse for wear, and one was
chafing the top of my foot badly. I had a watch that didn't
work; a fountain pen that did; a pair of reading glasses; the
remainder of my map of Korea; forty dollars in U. S. Korean-
occupation scrip, which nobody wanted; and the pistol. I
had no rain gear. When it rained I got wet. And it did rain,
repeatedly and with fervor. When rain and dark combined
I seldom knew where I was going for more than a few feet

64 General Dean's Story

ahead. And when it rained during the day I lost sleep.

My hunger was becoming dangerous, but there was no-
where to get food. Up here in the mountain area I seldom
found a house standing the result of the South Korean gov-
ernment's prewar campaign against the guerrillas, which had
consisted largely of burning the house of anyone the con-
stabulary or police even suspected of harboring or cooperat-
ing with guerrillas. And I was afraid to go down to the
villages. During the day I could see that the Communists
already had organized the whole area. Labor had been im-
pressed all over the place. Men worked in big gangs, mostly
on the roads; and old Japanese or Russian rifles and burp
guns had been given to a few youths in each town. These
kids were swelled up with the importance of their jobs as
home guards and just itching for a chance to fire those weap-
ons. I couldn't take any more risks.

I had found out some things about the Korean country-
side too. It didn't pay me to start walking early in the eve-
ning or to walk very far into the dawn. In the evenings
children and dogs were all around the villages; and in the
early morning old men would come out, often with small
youngsters trailing along, to look at the fields. They didn't
work in those early hours but just walked out to look, as if
planning the day's work. And like old men everywhere, they
awoke very early. If I walked in the evening or after the
first flush of dawn I was in danger of meeting sonic-
body.

I also found that I had to pick my daylight hiding places
well away from villages. During the day brush- and weed-
gathering parties old men, children, sometimes women-
worked the untilled areas around the towns. Few Koreans
can afford wood to burn in their homes, and they use the

The Capture 65

brambles and grass for cooking fuel and to make smudge
fires against the mosquitoes in the evenings. Each village at
nightfall looks as if it is on fire, each a sort of little Pittsburgh
under Its own pall of smoke.

These bramble-gathering parties cover a lot of ground.
Village children also play away from the houses, so I had to
find cover far out to be at all safe.

When I didn't, the results weren't good. One morning I
stopped to take a bath in a stream as I was crossing it, and
when I got started walking again this* was somewhere near
Yongdarn women already were coming down to the river
to wash clothes. I couldn't reach good cover and had to crawl
into some bushes much too close to the community laundry
spot. The women were not more than fifty yards from me,
and 1 didn't dare to sleep, fearing that children wandering
away from their mothers might find me. If they did, I wanted
to be awake to know it.

Across the river and back from it about a quarter of a mile
I could see a village, evidently the hub of the universe In this
area. Soldiers came and went from the police station, and
civilians constantly were reporting to the same headquarters.

The women washing their clothes in the river had come
from behind me, not across the stream, so I assumed there
must be another village, out of my view but very close and
on my side of the river. Three or four paths converged on
the river bank where the women did their washing and ex-
changed continuous gossip.

I got through the day all right; but that evening one woman
did not follow the paths the others had taken away from the
river. Carrying a big pile of clean clothes on her head, she
came up a path I had not seen before, not more than four feet
from me. As she passed she looked right at me. If I had a face

66 General Dean's Story

like hers, I could make a million dollars playing poker. There
was no facial expression at all Not a muscle twitched. She
just looked and kept on walking.

I was still trying to decide whether that old girl with the
washing on her head could possibly have failed to see me
when my question was answered by the arrival of two young
men who came from the direction in which she had gone.
They walked right to my hiding spot. Again there was no
use in trying to hide, so I asked for food, going through the
"pop"-plus-stomach-gesture routine once more.

They answered "Okay, okay,' 7 and made signs for me to
stay down, just as that first farmer carrying the baby girl
had done days before.

I thought, "Boy, after a long time I'm in luck again." I
could just taste that rice which would be along in a minute.
Both youths went back up the path the way they had come.

The next thing I knew, I heard a terrific commotion, and
rifle shots started coming over my head.

This place was an old orchard, all grown over with the
weeds that sheltered me. When I raised up enough to look,
I could see that in addition to the paths fanning out from the
river bank, a wide path higher up paralleled the river some
distance back. Beyond the path were houses, the village I had
not been able to see while down in the weeds. Upstream from
me was a ford across the river.

When the shooting started, so did a lot of yelling and in
the end that saved me. My two chums had brought out the
home guard force in force. Men were already all around me
in a big half-circle, and all the women and children in the
world were standing up there on that raised path to watch
the fun.

I could hear these men starting to close in toward me and

The Capture 67

the river, but it was a funny thing. I guess I was tired or
something. I went to sleep between close-ins. I'd wake up
with a start and think, "Dean, you damned fool, you can't
sleep this way! They'll be on top of you in a minute." Then
I'd drop off to sleep again.

But finally I did wake up enough to start crawling. I faded
back up the stream, beside a fill. These people had known
where I was when the show started, but they handed me one
telling advantage, because every time a man in the half-circle
would take a few steps forward to a new position, he'd yell
like mad to let everybody know where he was. That helped.
Once a man yelled just as I was about to crawl toward the
very spot where he was. I waited, and presently he went on
past me.

It was just dumbness on their part, but the fact is I slipped
through the circle. They were still yelling and closing in, but
I wasn't there any more. I just got out on the road and walked
away, not stopping to say good-by.

I think this date was about August 15. I made good time
that night, walking about twenty miles. When I didn't have
anything else to think about, I'd go back to my worrying. I
still was desperate to get back to our lines and the division,
but I knew my information that there were far more Com-
munists on the south flank than anybody thought would be
too late to do any good. I just wanted to get back into the
fight.

Then I'd worry about my aides and their families, being
sure in my mind that both Clarke and Bissett were dead by
this time, their young families fatherless because of me. I
worried about those families and my own. By this time Mil-
dred would know not only that I was missing but that chances
for my return were dwindling. I hoped that some of her

68 General Dean's Story

friends would have talked her into leaving Kokura, perhaps
going to the States or to Puerto Rico to be with June. Much
later I found this was just what our friends did do, although
they were not able to convince her to leave Japan until Au-
gust 15. She was in Puerto Rico when I was captured.

I also found that my hunch about Bissett had been partially
correct. As soon as he was sure I would not return he tried
to get himself assigned to a line company he was an ex-
enlisted man and always believed that was where a fi^htin^
man belonged but another headquarters grabbed him for
G-i work and never let him go. So he, like Clarke, survived
the Korean war.

Sometimes I prayed for these people, as well as for the
families of Bob Martin, whom I felt I certainly had sent to
his death, Hatfield, and others I knew or thought were dead.
These were actual prayers, repeated many times.

But when I dreamed it was mostly about food. I thought,
"When I get back to headquarters and a lot of people are
running around wanting to know what happened, I'll say,
'Now just a minute and I'll tell you all you want to know
about it. But first bring me one of those fruit compotes from
a ten-in-one ration. I want one of those cans of apricots or
plums, in that thick sugary syrup. Then 111 tell you about
it.' " I could just see that can of fruit and smell the juice.

One night I walked in the pouring rain, making wonderful
time, and found a spot to sleep in some bushes on a hill across
from a mill and a village. But when day dawned I realized
that I'd been walking the wrong way all night long. I was so
disgusted that I took to the hills immediately and walked back
practically all day. I think I made up most of the distance I'd
lost during that blind night's hiking.

The next night I decided to quit fooling around, trying to

The Capture 69

follow roads or trails. I'd go right over the mountains and
ridges to the east. I decided at least to stick to one plan of
action. I told myself, "Damn it, you're walking in circles,
you're wasting time. You've got to get back to division. You
should go straight east until you hit the railroad, then follow
it south and no matter how tough it is."

Well, that sounds good, but when you start crossing some
of that country it's awfully rough. The mountains average
only a couple of thousand feet in height, but they come right
up off sea level, not by plateaus, so you have to climb every
inch of every mountain.

That same night while I was lying down to rest on a very
steep trail that went almost straight up the side of a ridge, I
heard a clatter. Before I even could move a deer jumped right
over me. If I had raised my head, his hoofs would have
clipped me.

One problem up on the ridges was water. Very few have
any water on them; and where there was a stream the Ko-
reans had tapped it with an aqueduct to take the water down
to the rice paddies in the flats. Once I wasted a whole day
going down to the foot of a ridge to get a drink. At other
times I'd head for patches of dark foliage, hoping that they
would indicate a stream or pool, but often I found none when
I got there. For food, I tried kaffir stalks and grass, both of
which made me throw up. It was too early in the Korean
summer for many of the crops to have ripened; and I had no
weapons with which to catch game in any case, I saw very
little except some pheasants, and never got a standing shot at
one of those. I did find one variety of wild berry several
times. This was a sort of cane berry, somewhat like the
salmon berry of the Pacific Northwest, without much taste. I
suppose I ate a hundred of those, all told, while I was in the

70 General Dean's Story

mountains. Once I also found a field from which potatoes
had been dugand located four, each about the size of a wal-
nut, which the diggers had overlooked. I ate them raw.

As I grew weaker, my stomach regurgitated even water.
I kept looking for corn, and could not understand why I
couldn't find any. I knew it was grown in this part of Korea.
Later I discovered that in South Korea the corn is almost
always planted right in the dooryards of the houses, almost
never in the fields. The same is true of melons and squash, so
I had no chance to get any of these. Several times I saw the
rude towers which growers of ginseng root (beloved of the
Chinese as a tonic that will cure virtually anything from flat
feet to unripe old age, and also the principal component for
a 150- or lyo-proof liquor which will blow the top off your
head) build around their fields for the guards. But the guards
are unfriendly to practically everybody during the seven
years the ginseng requires to mature.

Although I continued to pass many burned houses in the
mountains, it was not until August 19 that I finally found one
lone house far up in the mountains and intact. I spotted this
good-looking structure in the night; but I knew there seldom
was any use asking for food at a Korean house between meals.
With no refrigeration or other storage for cooked foods, they
simply don't have anything to eat except when the family
meal is being cooked.

I flopped down in a path about two hundred yards from
this house and slept.

In the morning I was awakened by another man carrying
a little girl on his back. These fathers carrying small daugh-
ters were my luck charms, I guess. I asked for food and my
luck was in. He led me back to the house and the whole fam-
ily came out to greet me. The man turned out to be the eldest

The Capture 7 1

brother, about thirty-four. The family Included another mar-
ried brother, about thirty-two, their wives and children, and
two younger single brothers, twenty-two and eighteen.

They brought food out to me right in the yard rice and
pork fat. I don't know what happens to the lean part of pigs
in rural Korea, but the only part ever served by the country
people is the fat. I ate this ravenously, although I never had
cared for any kind of fat (much of my youth had been spent
in arguments with my elders about the amount of it I left
on my plate In Carlyle, Illinois) .

With signs I then told the brothers that I wished to stay
there four days. I'd lost weight and was terribly weak. I
said to myself, "If I can just have four days Fll be all
right. Just give me four days of rest, and I'll make it." I
thought I had put over the idea and that they had agreed.

These people had an unusually nice house, and I was led
to a lean-to, built against the back of it. But this lean-to was
filled with flies, just infested with flies, thousands of them.
Nevertheless I lay down on the mud floorand fought flies.
I stayed only five minutes. Then I had to crawl to the door
and throw up everything I'd eaten. This was August 20, and
the food was the first since July 25 or 26. 1 guess the pork fat
was just too much for a stomach ignored so long.

At noon the family gave me more rice and some kimchee
(fermented cabbage, with garlic). Again I threw it up. All
of them were quite concerned about me. That afternoon I
noticed some chickens in the yard, pointed to them, and tried
to indicate by signs that I wanted some eggs. The family mis-
understood (the most fortunate misunderstanding on record)
and instead killed one of the chickens. The result was some
of the best chicken soup I've ever eaten, full of potatoes and
rich with chicken fat. This I kept down. And the next day

72 General Dean's Story

I kept down all three meals, each of which consisted of rice,

roasted corn, and potatoes.

From the beginning 1 could tell that the second brother
wasn't enthusiastic about having me there. In a combination
of a few words of Korean and sign language he kept talking
about the Inmun Gun, and appeared very much surprised
when I indicated I had no desire to see any members of the
Communist Army. It's possible that up until that time he had
thought I was a Russian, but afterward he was increasingly
nervous. On the second day the two brothers brought up an
old man to look me over. He was a smiling old fellow, ap-
parently friendly, but the Inmun Gun kept coming up en-
tirely too often in their conversation. I thought he was some
old harabachie (grandfather, literally) whom they'd brought
from a neighboring town to give them advice about me. I
also thought the signs were bad. I gave my watch (which
wouldn't work) to the younger brother, and my billfold
(minus an insert with my identification in it) and my foun-
tain pen to the elder brother, to buy the remainder of that
four days of food and rest.

That evening the bad news came. The elder brother, still
kindly, nevertheless told me I would have to go. Evidently he
was afraid that they'd all be shot if the Communists found
me there, and perhaps he was right. I didn't feel that any of
these people loved the Inmun Gun especially, but they un-
doubtedly were afraid of it and wantedlike most Koreans
to keep out of trouble at any cost. The elder brother had been
in Muju when our aircraft bombed that town, and he demon-
strated to me how terrible it had been: "Oo urnphh, umphh,
umphh!"

Previously I had asked directions to several different towns,
trying not to give out too much information about where I

The Capture 73

actually was trying to go. So on this night the elder brother
gave me four ears of parched corn and some rice wrapped in
a cloth and led me out on a path about half a mile from the
house. There he left me.

It was a black night. 1 couldn't see; and perhaps in reaction
I was more tired than I'd been before. I'd taken only a few
steps before I stepped into a hole and fell on my face. I man-
aged to get about fifty yards farther, then just dropped down
in the trail and went to sleep. I wasn't especially low in rny
mind, just tired.

I could tell when this man left me that he felt I wasn't going
to make it. I could tell by his look that he thought, "You poor
bastard, you're finished."

But I thought, "Well, you sad character, you just don't
know. I'm going to surprise you. I am going to make it."

The elder brother had showed me the direction toward the
main road and had said "Taegu" often enough so I got the
idea that this was the proper route to that town, seventy miles
away as the crow flies. But I didn't worry about it the rest of
the night.

In the morning a highly important event occurred. Dean's
digestion began to work again, all the way. I've always
thought of this as the day of the great passage, although for a
while I thought it also might be my last. I was still being
happy about the whole thing when the second brother and
one of the younger ones, out to gather wood, found me and
they weren't at all happy about the fact that I still was only
half a mile from their house. They led me another half a mile
along the trail to make absolutely sure I was headed right
and going away. We were far up in the mountains, and they
took me to a spot from which we could look out and see in
the distance a valley at least ten miles away, with a highway

74 General Dean's Story

running down It. Very carefully the second brother showed
me the routes to Muju, to Chinan, to Taegu. He wanted me
to get away, almost anywhere, but away. You might think this
is difficult to convey when neither person speaks a word of the
other's language, but he managed.

I went on alone again. Frankly I never did find the road he
had pointed out. But long before I came even close to It I
did find more food. As I was walking along the trail I heard
a commotion ahead. I slipped up for a look- and there was a
whole gang of youngsters, twelve to sixteen years old, all
beating peach trees In the orchard of a burned-out house.
They were whaling the trees and of course knocked down
and took away all the good peaches. After they left I managed
to fill my pockets with the culls wizened, half -ripe, and the
size of walnuts, but food nonetheless. Then rain began again.
I spent the night in the shelter of a piece of corrugated Iron
which had not collapsed when the shack was burned.

After that I began to make time toward the east. I walked
all through the daylight hours of August 23, ate my parched
com, and felt so good that I walked all night too. I found an-
other orchard and again filled my pockets with peaches, rested
a while, then took off again, walking all the afternoon of
August 24. That evening I hit a main highway. In the woods
above it I rested until it was dark enough to start walking the
road. I think I made twenty or twenty-five miles that night,
and the only interruptions were when I had to hide out now
and then to let groups of highway workers pass me on their
way home. Fifty men were in one group, sixty-five in another.
I just lay In a ditch and let them go by.

Early In the morning, following the hairpin turns of the
highway, I saw a big village ahead. Evidently this was a par-
ticularly good farming area, because there were stables, barns,

The Capture 75

and silos, In addition to the shacks common to most villages.
I couldn't Imagine what the people were raising, but I took
no chances and made a big swing around the town.

But again I walked too long. Daylight caught me just oppo-
site another village, on a brand-new, improved road, which I
was sure must have been built with EGA money from the
United States. I thought, "Well, these people should be as
favorable to us as any Koreans, having had all this built for
them." So I wasn't too much worried when daylight caught
me. I just went off the road and up into some brush under
chestnut trees, a spot from which I could see the village, less
than half a mile away.

For quite a while previously I had been bothered by the
decreasing number of our aircraft In the skies, and had long
since abandoned my early dream that a plane would one day
fly low enough to see me wave. For days none had been even
close, although after my repatriation I learned from Lieuten-
ant General Earle E. Partridge that he personally had spent
long hours flying over the very area where I was wandering,
searching for me from a light (AT-G) training plane. But
he was doing most of that flying during the daylight hours
when I was asleep.

While I rested under the chestnut trees my spirits were ris-
ing. I figured that I could walk the hundred and twenty miles
to Pusan in ten days on the strength my two-day rest had
given rue. I was confident I'd be able to last through it. And
there was one new wonderfully reassuring factor. Away over
to the east I could hear the rumble of artillery definitely
guns, not bombing. I had not heard this since we'd left Tae-
jon, so it was like hearing from an old friend.

"Fm on my way back," I thought. "I'm going to make it."

I slept fairly well during the morning. In the afternoon an

7 6 General Dean's Story

old man and some boys came through the chestnut grove,
carrying little pint-sized sickles with which to cut brush.
They saw me. Once again I worked my system, asking for
food. I thought, "Well, damn it, things are breaking my way
now. I've been well fed and I'm on my way back. Everything
favors me, so I'll just continue to ride my luck."

The old man smiled as if we were long-time friends and
gestured toward the village. I rose and boldly marched down
that new highway to the first house. The village was a one-
street affair, with the street at right angles to the highway, and
I stopped at the house that had the highway right beside it.

The man of the house was in the back yard, making straw
shoes. His wife and children were watching. I made signs for

..' O

food and got vigorous and friendly affirmative nods. The
woman had no rice ready but put some on to boil. While I
waited for it to cook the householder went right ahead mak-
ing straw slippers. When he completed one he would put it
on and dance around in the yard to show me how good it was.
The children laughed, the shoemaker laughed, and so did I.
This was my lucky day.

Then the woman brought out the rice, with garlic beads
as a side dish. It was delicious. I ate all I was given and asked
for more to wrap in my handkerchief.

I left there about five o'clock, and had gone only a short
distance along the highway when a short little Korean passed
me, hiking along as if he were going to a fire. He got about
twenty feet ahead, then suddenly stopped, waited for me to
catch up, and walked along beside rne without saying a word.
Just to break the silence I started asking him the route to
Taegu and other towns in other directions. When we sat
down to rest at a bridge he picked up some rocks and in
the dust marked the routes to Taegu, Pusan, and Chonju.

The Capture 77

Although he spoke no English we managed to understand
each other. I was still trying to cover up a little about where
I intended to go, but I was beginning to be impressed with
him. I made him the same offer Fd made back in the village
before I lost Tabora million won to guide me to Taegu.

He sold me. I thought he understood everything. I asked
him where the Inmun Gun was, and he told me they were at
Chlnan. He intimated that I shouldn't worry, everything
would be okay he would take me right past the Inniun Gun.
I don't know how I got all that without any English, but I
did, or so I thought. I was sure that's what he was trying to
tell me.

We went farther down the road and came to a river where
bombing had knocked out a bridge. He pointed that out,
laughed as though he thought it exceptionally funny, and
said, "Pi-yang-gi" (airplane). He seemed pleased that the
bombing had been so good.

To ford the stream I had to take off my coveralls. I un-
dressed fully. He offered to carry my pistol for me, but I
didn't let him.

When we reached the far bank and I had dressed again, we
climbed up the bank and there was trouble waiting for us,
A village came right to the river at this point, and waiting for
us was practically the full manpower of the village, ten or
fifteen men in native clothes and all armed with clubs or
spears. They'd seen us crossing and were waiting for us. The
man in front, carrying a club, had an especially ferocious ex-
pression on his face and motioned to me to go back, that I
couldn't even go through their village.

Well, I didn't want to undress again and cross that river a
second time. I pulled my pistol from the holster and pointed
it at them. As I walked toward them, making threatening

7 8 General Dean's Story

motions with the pistol, the whole group backed away slowly.

Meanwhile the little Korean by my side kept jabbering to
them, and I had the definite impression that his talk had more
to do with their retreat than my pistol. I thought, "He's fast-
talking them." Still with their clubs and spears but just stand-
ing there and not doing anything about it, the whole gang let
us go through the town.

Before we had gone more than a fraction of a mile a second
Korean caught up with us. I realize now that this was the same
ferocious-looking character who had been at the head of the
village mob, but at the time I failed to recognize him without
his club. He seemed to be great pals with Han, the man who
was guiding me; and Han made me understand that this new
chum was "okay, okay." We three walked down the road to-
gether until we reached a bend.

Han said suddenly, "Inmun Gun!" and signaled to me to
get down.

I thought, "Boy, this is bad. There's something around this
corner." I jumped into some bushes beside the road, holding
my pistol ready.

Han went on ahead but came back in a few minutes, say-
ing, "Okay, okay."

"This boy is all right," I thought. "This is working out
fine."

We went ahead, and around the bend found fifty or a hun-
dred Korean civilians filling holes in the road. This was a big
project, really a major industry, and they all were working
fast, although I saw nobody with guns keeping them at it. We
walked right past, just as if we all had a perfect right to use
the highway. Some of them looked up, but no one said any-
thing or interfered with us.

The Capture 79

When we came to another bend a little farther on we went
through the same routine the Inmun Gun! warning, Dean
jumping into the bushes with his pistol, then an okay and an-
other stroll right past a working party. This time I noticed
two men with rifles, and there was an uncomfortable feeling
along my spine when we turned our backs to them. But again
nothing happened.

I thought, "This Han is a pretty good boy. He is going to
take me through." But he did a couple of strange things,
which should have warned me. One was walking so fast. He
walked as if he were going to a fire, and I couldn't keep up
with him. Finally I just sat down. I said, "All right, you peo-
ple go ahead." But they both stopped with me, and Han tried
to explain. He indicated that he was hungry and wanted to
eat before we reached Chinan. It was getting late in the eve-
ning, and we had walked about eight miles, at full speed.

When we started again, however, we went only a short
distance, then turned into a house beside the road. I under-
stood that Han wanted to stop there for food. Once inside,
they served us sake, but only a plate of garlic beads for food.
I took one little glass of the liquor but ate all the garlic beads
they brought. The people in the house wanted me to take
more sake, and Han too urged it on me. I should have been
warned by this. I did think, "What are these people trying to
do? Get me drunk?" But my thinking didn't go any further
than that.

While we were sitting in the house, and after a lot of con-
versation, a third man joined us. He walked along with us
when we left. At the next bend we did the same routine a
third time, with two men going ahead and one staying in the
ditch with me. The stumbling block ahead was a small town,

8o General Dean's Story

not a road crew. The two scouts finally came back and gave

us the okay. We walked right through the town.

Just as we got on the other side of town there was some
yelling behind us. I got out of sight while Han and his second
friend went to talk, this time to our rear. Then Han called
something to the fellow who had stayed with me (Little
Ferocious, who had led the village gang), and he motioned
rne to come out. I did, once more putting my pistol back in
the holster, then sitting dow r n on the edge of the road. The
road was on a cut above a stream, and we hung our feet over
the edge. The night was warm and there was bright moon-
light.

All of a sudden, around a corner from the village came
about fifteen men, and somebody fired a rifle over our heads.
I reached for my pistol and got my hand on it, but the little
devil sitting beside me grabbed my wrist with both his hands.

I struggled to my feet, with him still hanging on, but I
couldn't get the gun out. I fell in the dirt, he with me, and we
rolled around in the road as I tried to get him over to the edge
of the cut again, to kick him down toward the river. I thought
the fall would break his hold, even if we both went over, and
I'd have a chance.

But the gang had only about twenty-five feet to rush us,
and before I could get this character to the edge they were
on top of us. About three rifle barrels were on my head, and
as we wrestled around, they- kept bumping me. It was very
annoying.

They were all yelling, and I suppose they were telling me
to surrender, but I kept on fighting with this fellow who had
a hold on my arm, and trying to kick somebody where he'd
never forget it. But he never let go. I yelled, u Shoot! Shoot,
you sons of bitches! Shoot!"

The Capture 81

I remember thinking, "This is an ignominious way to have
your lights put out, but this is it."

Then they were twisting at my arms. There were several
of them doing it, and they weren't easy with it. They had
both my arms twisted, and that shoulder of mine really hurt-
but no physical pain hurt so much as the thought, "Well, these
miserable devils have you as a prisoner."

They tied both hands behind me with sashcord, pulled so
tightly that the circulation was cut off, then jerked me to my
feet and shoved me back toward the town we'd just passed.
I still thought there was no use in being a prisoner. I tried to
run. I wanted them to shoot me. But I was so weak that I
made only a yard or so before somebody danced up and
shoved me from behind so that I fell on my face again. They
all laughed.

As they pulled me up I said, "I can't walk." They kept
shoving me, but I wouldn't walk. My shoulder hurt too much,
and those bonds on rny hands. I indicated I wouldn't move so
long as they had my hands tied that way, and this must have
confused them. At any rate they finally took the ropes off
entirely.

Then we all marched toward the police station. Han was
standing there beside the door, looking pleased with himself,
and so were the other two whom I had thought were helping
me. I did wish I could have one last kick at a couple of them,,
but there was no chance. In the station somebody searched
me. I had niy identification tags, some cards in the part of my
billfold I hadn't given away (I still have the same A.G.O.
card, which was given back to me eventually), an immuniza-
tion register, and some snapshots of my son and daughter.
They took all these, and one character reached into my shirt
pocket. I wear a partial denture, but my mouth had been

82 General Dean's Story

hurting so that I had been carrying this denture in my pocket.

About the only smart thing I did that night was to grab that
denture, just as the searcher took it out of my pocket, and pop
it into my mouth where it belonged. That denture had been
painful; but I never put it in any faster and never mind the
pain. I knew that if anybody ever had time to see how much
gold was in it I'd never get it back.

While they were searching me I was standing in front of a
desk, and behind the desk a Korean calendar with Arabic
numerals hung on a wall. I pointed to it, and one of the men
put his finger on the figure twenty-five.

It was the twenty-fifth of August, my wedding anniver-
sary.

Three years later, in September 1953, Han Doo Kyoo,
aged forty, and Choi Chong Bong, twenty-four, were ar-
rested by South Korean police and accused as my betrayers.
Police said the pair received the equivalent of five dollars for
turning me in to the Commies. On January 12, 1954, both
defendants were convicted. Although the prosecutor had
asked only five-year prison terms for them, the judge sen-
tenced Choi to death and Han to life imprisonment. I had
previously written to President Rhee, asking clemency for
the two men if they were convicted, but the trial judge de-
clared the court had not received any official notice of my
request. Their defense statements indicated that they had in-
tended to take me through to United Nations lines but ran
into so much trouble in getting me past the various barriers
that they decided they should turn me in to prevent my death
in a hopeless fight. Having had no method of communicating
accurately with them at any time, Fm simply not in a position
to guess whether this might have been true. I did not feel that
further punishment of these men would accomplish anything.

CHAPTER V

Small from Texas

I spent that night In a cage quite literally.

This object, sitting In a corner of the main room at the
police station, was about four feet long and the same height,
but built like the letter L that Is, the high portion was only
large enough for my head and shoulders. I could sit in one
position with my knees drawn up slightly but could not lie
down or stand up. This was nothing they had dreamed up
especially for my benefit, but equipment of much age and fre-
quent usage. I suppose they ordinarily kept the town drunk
in it on his bad nights.

I made one horrible mistake that night and learned one
important lesson. The mistake was to take off my combat
boots. After I'd been in the cage for a while I pulled them off.
One had chafed my foot until my instep was infected and
had been bothering me for a couple of weeks; also, they
smelled awful. I made signs to the guards that I'd like to have
the boots set outside to air. Frankly, I didn't want to smell
them in my cell.

This suggestion was greeted with startled enthusiasm. If
those people could have spoken perfect English, they couldn't
have said more plainly, "Boots? Oh, my goodness, that's some-
thing we overlooked." They took them out of the cage, and
somebody else had them on within five minutes and I didn't

83

84 General Dean's Story

have any boots thereafter. I realized my own dumbness almost

immediately, but too late to do anything about it.

The lesson was provided by two North Korean Army pay-
masters, who arrived shortly after I was brought in. They
came with bundles of won notes and spent the whole night
doling out piles of money to the local officials. Each gun-soo
(corresponding to town or county officials) evidently had
provided a hundred men for work on the roads, and this was
the big pay-off. The thing which struck me was that every-
body was happy, and there was no resentment. These officers
were just two Santa Clauses corne to town, and nobody mind-
ed at all. The key to their success was an apparently unlim-
ited supply of currency.

It was perfectly obvious to me, then and later, that the way
for an occupying army to gain favor with a local population,
especially a population of the same blood, is to pay well for
everything it gets, spreading money around. It was easy for
the Communists in this case because they had captured the
South Korean government's currency plates in Seoul, and it
was merely a printing press problem; but the lesson is one that
can be applied to any army, including our own.

The point is, I never saw the Inmun Gun steal anything
outright, although the theft may actually have been just as
bad as any in the long run. When a soldier wanted a farmer's
peach he always paid for it. He went out and bought it. So
even when the currency turned out to be worthless, that
individual soldier was not the target of the farmer's wrath.

All night long the two officers dished out the money, then
folded up their briefcases and left just before dawn. Inci-
dentally, neither of these paymasters showed the slightest
interest in me, nor, for that matter, did the local officials.
None of these people spoke English; and apparently no one

A Small Boy from Texas 85

guessed that the dirty old man in the cage was a propaganda
prize because of the accident of military rank.

Han, the man who had turned me in, had come into the
police station when I was taken in, and he stayed there all
night. I didn't see him do any more talking. A couple of
times in the early evening he smiled at me, as if he had done
me a big favor. But it's always hard to tell what a Korean
means by a laugh. Those youngsters who had shoved me
down in the road when I tried to run had laughed, but I'm
not sure it was sadism. It could have been embarrassment, or
any number of things. I've seen Koreans laugh when a dog
was being tortured to death. It would be hard to tell the
difference between that laugh and the one Clarence Rhee
used to let out when he was reading Korean newspapers to me
as military governor. He was an official of the government
and a patriotic man but whenever one of the newspaper
stories was exceptionally bad news, he'd laugh. I never could
figure it out. It's on a par with their feeling about death:
that to kill a man isn't too serious but to mutilate his body is
terrible. Rhee, for example, never seemed affected by stories
of guerrillas killing constabulary or farmers, but if the man's
head had been cut off after death he was horrified.

So I don't know what Han's nervous little smile meant
there in the police station. He stayed quietly in a corner all
night, and left in the early morning. I never saw him again.

A guard brought me breakfast shortly after dawn. I was
allowed to get out of the cell and eat at a table. The meal
was excellentrice, soup, and kimchee. Then I was put back
into the cell and stayed there until nine or ten o'clock. When
they hauled me out a second time I could see I was about to
be moved. I demanded my boots but I didn't get them.
Somebody did bring me a pair of Korean rubber shoes not

86 General Dean's Story

mates, and both with holes in the soles the size of pancakes.
They were too short, and when I tried to walk they came
off. I made noises of complaint, so finally one fellow folded
newspapers to make insoles, then brought some straw rope
and tied the shoes to my feet.

My escort consisted of one Korean youngster, in an Inmun
Gun uniform and armed with a long rifle, and a civilian carry-
ing a briefcase. The civilian had a bicycle; the soldier and I
walked. The little town where I was captured was Sang] on-
myon; and we started toward Chinan, only a short distance
away. But the walk took more than an hour, because my feet
hurt so much that I had to stop at frequent intervals. The
man on the bicycle got impatient, but the soldier was a pleas-
ant youngster, showed no evidence of being rough, and let
me stop whenever I needed a rest.

The one thing I noticed especially was that my guard was
quite a hero to all the small children we met on the way.
Whenever we passed a group he would say a phrase to them
and the children would reply in chorus. It sounded like
"Chosen-all," which I assumed must be some Communist slo-
gan about a united Korea, because they all knew it and re-
peated it with enthusiasm. Often the children would start
singing a marching air, which I was to hear thousands of times
the Inmun Gun song. I thought, "Boy, these Communists
have done a job of indoctrinating these youngsters." They
were delighted with the soldier, but not even interested in a
captive.

In Chinan I was taken to a house apparently being used
as a company headquarters. A cheerful young captain already
was busily cleaning my pistol. He dropped that job and came
over to try to talk to me. It wasn't a great success since he
spoke not a single word of English. However, I could tell

A Small Boy from Texas 87

that he was asking If I was hungry, and when I nodded he
immediately ordered up food for me-a bowl of boiled pork
fat. After the walk I ate this like candy, and the captain was
so pleased that he sent out for a bag of ginger cookies, which
he paid for himself. I tried to share these with him and the
two lieutenants also in the headquarters, but none of them
would take any. So I just ate and ate; and the captain was as
pleased as a child who succeeds in getting a puppy to eat. To
top off my meal he brought me some apples.

Two women in uniform also were In the house, and I
could see that one of them was some sort of political Instruc-
tor. All the soldiers gathered, and she held a class for them.
I was pleased, in a backward sort of way, when an air-raid
alarmthey used a series of rifle shots and a bell interrupted
the instruction and everybody had to run for cover in door-
ways. I was moved to a seat in a closet doorway. The planes
went on past Chinan, without bombing or strafing. When
they had passed the political class was resumed.

I was moved twice more during the day, first to a police
station, then to another building, which might have been a
rice warehouse or garage. This was some sort of registration
point, with people coming and going constantly. I was left
sitting by myself In a comer, under guard, for a long time.
Up In a parklike area above the warehouse I could hear drill-
ing and counting off all afternoon, as if local youths were
being drilled by the Inmun Gun in close order. It seemed like
a very long time for close-order drill to last, but they kept it
up. Once again I was struck by the fact that If the people of
South Korea resented the northern invaders, they certainly
weren't showing it. To me, the civilian attitude appeared to
veer between enthusiasm and passive acceptance. I saw no
sign of resistance or any will to resist.

88 General Dean's Story

Nobody showed any further interest in me until about
seven o'clock in the evening, when I was taken out to a truck
packed with Korean civilians, obviously prisoners. They were
mostly men, but with some women. I was pushed toward the
center of the mob, and there I wedged myself down. I had
not yet learned to sit cross-legged comfortably. I put my feet
out in front of me, and that was a bad mistake. People sat on
my feet and insteps, others on my legs and knees. Knees
jabbed into my back and ribs, which still ached, and pushed
against my sore shoulder.

Very few words were spoken, none to me. Three or four
guards clung to the sides of the truck, with one foot in and
one outand thirty-seven people were jammed between them.
I didn't get a good look at the truck, but it was about the
size of one of our two-and-a-half -ton vehicles, and may even
have been one of ours. None of the people showed any emo-
tion whatever. As we started out I saw a road sign in English:
"Chonju- 7 8 miles."

But we still weren't fully loaded. About ten miles out of
Chinan the truck stopped beside a rice paddy. Across the
dikes came a line of men with their wrists bound, and roped
together. This single file of prisoners climbed right in on top
of the rest of us. Twenty more had managed to get in when
I lost count, but I think there were at least twice that num-
ber. It was impossible for every one of them to touch the
bottom of the truck; they were piled on top of the rest of us
like bags of grain.

The truck ground ahead again, but fortunately for us
(otherwise somebody surely would have smothered) the load
was too heavy. The vehicle faltered and stalled on a hill, and
the guards took oif some of that last chain gang. With the
remainder, we bumped on into Chonju, arriving in the middle

A Small Boy from Texas 89

of the night just as a flight of our bombers unloaded on one
end of the town near the railroad tracks.

We were ordered out of the truck in front of the police
station when the bombing started. I was singled out from the
other prisoners and hustled to protection in the archway of
a school or church in one of the mission compounds. When
my guard finally brought me back, past a mission hospital,
we met townspeople carrying two litters with a woman and
a child on them. Both were bloody masses.

We got back on the truck and drove through the other
end of town, passing a group of houses still smoking from
the bombs while civilians poked through the wreckage, look-
ing for other victims. I don't know what the objective of this
bombing was, but the railroad, a spur line, was unhurt.

We were taken to the provincial penitentiary, which I
remembered having inspected when I was military governor.
(There was irony in this.) This was now an improved insti-
tution, with at least two new cell blocks. All the prisoners
were lined up; and each of us was made to turn out his pock-
ets and put all his belongings in front of him on the ground.
I had nothing left except a handkerchief and a few cookies
which the Inmun Gun captain had given me. While an in-
specting party was working down the line I ate the cookies,
and they let me keep the handkerchief when I put up an
argument about it although I was arguing in English and
nobody understood a word. The prisoners were counted off
in twenties, and each group moved separately toward the cell
blocks. The count didn't come out even, so I was led off by
myself to a twenty-man cell, the most commodious I'd ever
seen in a Korean prison, with a nice smooth floor and twenty
little wooden pillows lined up along one side. The guards
locked the door, and I picked out a pillow.

90 General Dean's Story

As a policeman back in Berkeley, California, many years
before, I'd made a few arrests and watched the people taken
off to cells to spend the night. But this was the first time in
my life that I'd been on the other end of the story. I slept
fitfully.

There was no sound in the prison during the night, no
weeping, no noise, from the many prisoners. Bombers came
over again, and I did a little hoping that they might hit this
lovely brick building, so close to the railroad yards; but they
didn't even score a near miss just a lot of racket. I could not
hear any anti-aircraft fire.

In the morning the aperture in the cell door opened and
a guard shoved in a little tin bowl of rice; just as I was about
to eat it he indicated I should thrust it outside again, and
some grass soup was poured over it. The rice might have
been all right, but that grass soup was the most sickening stuff
I've ever tasted. As hungry as I was, I could only pick at it.

Later that morning the first of the questions came to me.
A guard handed in a pencil and a printed form, which asked
my name, rank, organization, what my orders were, where
I'd landed in Korea and where was Syngman Rhee?

They already had my identification card and tags, so there
was no point in trying to hide my identity. I put down my
name and rank and as for orders, I wrote: "To assist the
Republic of Korea in repelling the aggressors from the
North."

I knew full well that I didn't have to answer that or any
similar questions, but I figured the answer would make the
Communists mad and at the moment I wanted to do just that.

After about an hour guards came and took me to the com-
mandant's office. The commandant was rather a handsome
man, wearing North Korean Army blue breeches and black

A Small Boy from Texas 9 1

boots, but a white shirt and a civilian coat. He needed a shave
badly, and had the only green eyes I've ever seen in a Korean.
Somehow they reminded me of a tiger's eyes. He was friendly
and apologetic for having put me in a cell. An interpreter was
present, a chap with long hair and in need of a shave even
more than the commandant. He told me the commandant
had no idea, when I was brought in, that I was an officer, but
that he would make up for his oversight. He'd bring me a
barber, give me a chance to wash, and secure some decent
clothes. I would have to go back to my cell temporarily, but
they'd prepare another room, give me better meals and the
courtesies due my rank. Then he also asked a question: Where
was Syngman Rhee?

This was question number one of some thousands which
were to be asked, and it made no more and no less sense than
most of them. Always, question and long-winded statement
were closely related. The commandant said, "Your family
and your countrymen are concerned about you. You must go
on the radio and tell your family that you are well and being
well treated, and tell your people that there is no use in con-
tinuing the war. Tell them the people of South Korea have
welcomed us as their brothers. You must do this for the sake
of your family and friends, and to save the lives of your
countrymen."

There was much more of the same sort of thing. I said I
wouldn't go on the radio, and that nobody would believe any
such statement even if I did make it. I don't remember my
exact answers to some of his questions; but frankly I was just
indulging myself. I was trying to be as sarcastic as possible,
for my own amusement, not to make these characters laugh.
This was one time I didn't have to be careful. The things I'd
never say normally, for fear of hurting someone's feelings,

92 General Dean's Story

sounded terrifically witty to me now. I said I didn't have the
faintest idea where the president of South Korea was; and
when I was asked why we had come to Korea, I embroidered
my written statement. I said we had come to help South
Korea repel the aggressors from the North, who had violated
South Korean national territory, that it was our duty as a
member of the United Nations to assist in repelling that inva-
sion, that the free world looked to us I gave him quite a
speech.

He said, "Well, now you can see how your forces have
been driven back. So if you were released, would you con-
tinue to fight us?"

I said, "Yes, that's what I want to do. That's why I've been
trying to get back, so I could fight again. I know I can do
better next time, and kill more of you for the men we
lose."

He didn't care for that. Finally he said, "General, you're
a brave man, but you're very ignorant politically."

That ended the political part of the discussion, but he
couldn't resist a little something personal. He said, "I've seen
you before, general, even if you don't remember me. I was
a political prisoner right in this same prison when you in-
spected it as military governor. But I'm going to treat you
better than you treated me."

As military governor I had been technically in charge of
South Korean prisons, but did not control immediate opera-
tions, which were handled by Koreans under the advice and
supervision of Americans. I don't think that the treatment as
a whole was bad, although some things possibly seemed worse
to the Koreans than to me. I remember that on one prison
inspection trip I was pleased by the number of beans mixed
with the rice being fed to prisoners, but my interpreter,

A Small Boy from Texas 93

Klmmy Kim, was affected just the other way. He said, "I
hope I never get put In prison."

Prisons were overcrowded at that time, however, and I
was very much disturbed when I found out how many people
were being held for long periods without being brought to
trial. In April of 1948 I had pardoned more than thirty-five
hundred at one time because I found that some of them had
been incarcerated for as long as eighteen months without trial,
and charged only with talking against the government, or
opposing rice collections. In the bad food days in Korea
rations for prisoners were larger than those for civilians,
because we expected the prisoners to work.

We were only partially successful in raising the standards,
and we never had enough U. S. personnel to be positive that
all our orders were being carried out; but we were trying.
And, of course, I was responsible, as military governor, for
any bad treatment that occurred. That's one of the things you
accept when you take a job of that sort.

The prison commandant also gave me some information,
which I believe was honest, so far as he was concerned. We
had lost Taegu, he said, and the fall of Pusan to the Commu-
nists was only a matter of hours. I think the captain in Chinan
had tried to give me the same information, without benefit of
interpreter. The commandant was quite confident that we
were being swept off the whole Korean peninsula.

I was confused. It was true that Pd seen fewer and fewer
airplanes in the previous couple of weeks; but the informa-
tion didn't check with the artillery fire I was sure I had heard
on the last day of my freedom. I didn't know what to think.

At last, the commandant dismissed me to go to get my
shower, the promised shave and haircut and some very care-
fully posed before-and-after photo coverage. The interpreter

94 General Dean's Story

said, "You'll be amazed to see the difference." I don't doubt
that I would have, if I had ever seen the pictures. I wish I had
them now.

Before the "after" picture was made I was given a very
much patched pair of American olive drab trousers and a sun-
tan shirt to replace my coveralls. The fact that both were
clean made them seem wonderful, old as they were; and I
noticed that the size fifteen shirt collar fit me very well,
although my normal neck measurement is sixteen and a half.
The barber who did the job on my hair and beard was only
about fourteen years old, but he knew his business. And I
was delighted to get that shave. I'd caught a glimpse of myself
in a mirror that morning and had realized that I probably was
the ugliest man in the world with a month's beard. From my
left chin it comes out black, but is white off the right side. In
the middle it's just bare.

During this washing and shaving I saw the interpreter
going down a hallway and a guard was with him. When I
asked later, he admitted that he too was a prisoner. He said
he had been an employee of our military government in
Taejon, in an official capacity, and would be tried for having
cooperated with the Americans and for being a reactionary.

"What are they going to do?" I asked. "Shoot you?"

He shook his head. "No, they're going to give me a trial.
Fm sure it will be fair. I think I'll be freed, because I now see
my mistakes." He added that he had been well treated in
prison and that his wife was allowed to visit him. He also said
that Eun Suk Koo, former South Korean chief of communi-
cations, was in the same prison; and later the same day, in a
hallway, he introduced me, but we had no time to talk. All I
could do was wish both of them luck.

The interpreter appeared to be quite sincere about his

A Small Boy from Texas 95

change of viewpoint and gave me a considerable lecture about
the fact that the future of Korea lay only in unification under
communism. He also said he thought I would see the light,
once I had some political education.

I was taken to a cottage outside the prison compound,
where there was a U. S. white army cot with a mattress,
pillows, and sheets and where even the inside plumbing
worked, rarest phenomenon in all Korea. A woman brought in
an excellent noon meal, with meat, and I had some rest before
I was called back to the commandant's office that afternoon.

This time five or six men in civilian clothes were present,
in addition to the commandant and the interpreter, I thought
I had seen some of those faces before. The questions started
immediately, and the first was, "How can you prove that
you're General Dean?"

I said, "I have no desire to prove that I'm General Dean."

The next was, "Why did the Americans come over here?"

Again I said, "To help the people of South Korea to retain
their national integrity and to protect them from the aggres-
sors from the North."

Then they shot a whole series of questions at me: "Why
do the Americans bomb innocent women and children?"
"Why do they bomb children in swimming?" "Why do they
bomb farmers along the highways and kill their cattle?" I
answered all these questions by saying that Americans never
knowingly harm women, children, or noncombatants; but this
didn't even slow up the flow of questions. The next was,
"Why do Americans prey on schoolhouses and churches?"

I said, "The only reason a church or a schoolhouse is ever
struck is when it is evident from the air that the Inmun Gun
is using those buildings as Army installations, especially as
command posts."

96 General Dean's Story

They wanted to know, "How do you account for so many
women and children being killed?"

I gave as one of the reasons that the Communists brought
military operations right in amongst civilians, into cities, and
were using all sorts of buildings for military purposes.

Then my principal questioner said, "We won't discuss that
any more."

These fellows also wanted to know the whereabouts of
Syngman Rhee but instead of listening to my answer, told
me themselves. "You ought to know that your government
has taken him to Tokyo. What does your government mean,
supporting a puppet like Syngman Rhee?"

I did not answer that, so the interview ended with several
of them giving me lectures about what was wrong with
United States policy, accusing the U. S. of exploiting South
Korea and preventing unification of the country. I think even
the interpreter was a little bored.

As the civilians filed out the commandant asked me if every-
thing about my treatment was satisfactory, and whether I
wanted anything special I said I would like some of the big
peaches which I had admired in this area during occupation
days. I had not been able to eat any then, because I had to
obey my own order against the use of any indigenous food
while the Koreans were hungry. But now I thought the
peaches should be ripe. . . .

The commandant sent out for a dozen, and he and the inter-
preter and I each ate a peach, congratulating one another on
how big and juicy they were.

On the way back to my cottage I asked the interpreter,
"Who were those babies doing the questioning?"

"Oh, that was the press," he said.

This made me feel much better. Now I remembered where

A Small Boy from Texas 97

I had seen some of them before as hecklers on the edges of
press conferences in the old days when I had visited here as
governor. Also, I thought, "Now at least the world will know
I'm a prisoner, and my family's fears will be eased."

I'm still curious about this situation. The interview was
given and stories about it printed. But nothing was picked up
at this time even by Communist newspapers outside Korea.
Later, references to my capture were made by Tass, the Rus-
sian news agency; and I was told that I was mentioned in a
collection of short stories published in Poland by a Russian
writer. But for some reason none of this information seeped
back across the Iron Curtain to my family.

I'm in possession of a fragmentary story that apparently
appeared in some English-language newspaper in Korea as a
result of this interview, but it reached me by such a circuitous
route that I'm not sure of its origin. In part, the story reads:

Question: "How were you arrested?"

General Dean: "Due to the blind shootings from Australian
airplanes. I lost most of my men. Furthermore, my driver was
killed while we were in retreat. Therefore I sheltered myself
alone into [sic] a mountain and attempted to make my way to-
ward Pusan for approximately fifteen days in the mountains but
failed and was arrested by the People's Army."

Question: "What is your last peak of aspiration?"

General Dean: "It is a painstaking resentment that I am cap-
tured by you fellows. I wish I could command my officers and
men again and annihilate all you People's Army."

At this time Eun Suk Koo exchanged handshakings with Gen-
eral Dean and thus they consoled each other's situation. But the
People's Army guard brought and offered some food including
tinned goods to General Dean, however General Dean caster"
away these foods and made his resistance to the guards. . . .

98 General Dean's Story

There is more of this, which reached me via a letter, but it
adds no more clarity to the situation than the above. Just how
that part about Australian airplanes got in is beyond me. At
the time I didn't know there were any Australian planes in
Korea.

In the cottage, that cot with the mattress looked wonderful
so wonderful that I'm afraid I only grunted when the inter-
preter told me, "You know the warden bought those peaches
with his own money? See what a kind man he is." A good
supper delayed me some, but I headed toward the cot as soon
as I could. This, I thought, would be the night's sleep I had
been dreaming about. This would make up for days in thick-
ets and nights in the rain.

But I was a little premature. I was restless, and every time
I turned over, the cot squeaked. Every time the cot squeaked,
the guard in the room would bellow at me. These guards were
just youngsters, and I suppose they thought I was trying to
escape; but their bellowing wasn't restful.

In the middle of the night my old dysentery started up
again. The first time or two I had to get up I had arguments
with the guard, but he finally desisted. I couldn't stay in bed
just because he wanted me to, so I got up regardless of whether
he was still yelling. Finally he got the idea and must have
passed the word to the men who relieved him, because I had
no further trouble. I would holler "benjo" (Japanese for
toilet) , and they understood that. Any Korean above the age
of sixteen understands Japanese, although some of them pre-
tend that they cannot. It was a required language all the times
the Japanese controlled the peninsula.

I was up five or six times that night, and for many nights
thereafter five or six trips were the minimum; the maximum,
up to thirty-six times a day. There's one thing about Dean's

A Small Boy from Texas 99

digestion: it never does anything halfway it either doesn't
work at all, or it works all the time.

There was more questioning the next day, this time by a
stout major general of the Inmun Gun who sat behind the
warden's desk while a youngster with a sub-machine gun
stayed in the room to guard him. The commandant and the
interpreter also were there, but the general did all the talking,
the interpreter translating for him. He was a very calm, soft-
spoken man, not threatening and not ingratiating. I think the
other two must have been as tired of the same old questions as
I was: Would I go on the radio to broadcast? Why were the
Americans here? Why were non-military targets bombed?
The only thing he left out was Syngman Rhee, and I felt I
probably should have reminded him to ask that too.

The questioning went on for forty-five minutes or more, but
of course it was slowed and complicated by the translating.
Neither of us could be sure that the interpreter was getting
everything straight. This was evident when he asked me about
the bombing of civilians.

I said, "We're not in the business of bombing civilians
we're too busy working on military targets/'

I don't know how that was interpreted, but it infuriated the
young guard. He snarled and jumped forward, pointing his
sub-machine gun at me. He was so excited and upset that I
laughed and asked the general, "What's the matter with him?
Does he want to shoot me?"

The general spoke to him in Korean and ordered him out of
the room. To me, he said, "The guard is very young, but he
is moved and greatly disturbed by the barbarities which your
Army has committed against his countrymen."

I still wonder what the interpreter told them in Korean.

The general might have let that part of the questioning stop

ioo General Dean's Story

there, but I wanted to get in a few thoughts of my own, so !
said, "As long as we're talking, there's something I want to get
off my chest. You people are not following the tenets of the
Geneva Convention. Of all the men who captured me and shot
at me with arms while I was being pursued in the hills, only one
wore an arm band, let alone a uniform. You're fighting
this war with men dressed in civilian clothes, so far as I can
see."

The general's attitude toward me was that of a kindly senior
trying to straighten out a wayward child, but he didn't deign
to answer this. Instead he asked me if I would return to Korea
to fight again if I were released.

I told him I surely would, if my country would let me, after
the poor job Fd done the first time.

His reply was, "You are a brave man but very ignorant."

This was roughly the same thing I'd been told by the
commandant: but the same interpreter was working, so the
words may actually have been his rather than the general's
phraseology.

The only thing that amused me during this interview was
the realization that our names and numbers confuse the enemy
almost as much as the many Rhees and Paks and Kims confuse
us. Many questions concerned happenings on the east coast
of Korea or involved Negro troop units. Finally I realized
that this general had me confused with Major General William
Keane of the zjth Infantry Division, and was hopelessly
fouled up between the 24th Infantry Regiment, part of
Keane 's command, and the 24th Infantry Division, which I
commanded. I didn't bother to straighten him out.

Actually none of this official interrogation bothered me as
much as the fact that practically everybody working around
the penitentiary wanted to interrogate me on his own. Every

A Small Boy from Texas i o i

corporal or private who spoke a few words of English would
try to get his oar in when I was in the washroom, going down
the corridors, or trying to get some sleep. One after another
they came in, each one saying, "Rhee Syngrnan" or "Truman"
In exactly the same tone of voice. A lot of them also asked me
about Henry Wallace, on whom they apparently pinned great
hopes. And one spoke a whole line. He said, "O America,
America! My hopes were in America, but America has failed
us."

I finally had to complain to the commandant about the
constant harassment in order to get relief.

That day and night my dysentery grew worse, and the next
morning a doctor came to see me. He felt my stomach, listened
to my breathing, and spent most of his time giving my chest
a very thorough thumping although personally I doubted
that the seat of dysentery was to be found in the chest. He left
some medicine, which may have been salts and bismuth.
Whatever it was, it did me no good.

In the evening the prison commandant showed up again, this
time freshly shaved and in full officer's uniform. He looked so
much better that I might not have recognized him, except for
the green eyes. He let me know, without an interpreter, that I
was to be on my way. I was given a tight-fitting American
fatigue jacket. I pointed to my feet and the old Korean rubber
shoes, which were all I had. The commandant looked all
around and the unluckiest guard in the prison was right where
the boss could see him. This fellow had big feet for a Korean,
and was wearing G.I. shoes. The commandant nailed him and
forced him to change shoes with me. The pair I got were the
most odoriferous shoes I've ever approached, but I could cram
my feet into them. Although they were about two sizes too
small, they definitely were an improvement over what I'd had

102 General Dean's Story

before. I was ordered into a three-quarter-ton truck (United
States property, naturally) with three guards and an officer.
All the prison officials came out to bid me good-by like old
friends. It was quite a farewell.

We were no sooner on the road to Taejon, just after dark,
when United Nations aircraft began coming over. Whenever
one did, the truck would stop and the guards would insist that
we go fifty or a hundred yards out in the bushes or up a hill
away from the road, to wait there until the sound of the plane
had faded out entirely. We would remain quite motionless all
the time it was above us, even though the night was black.
This delayed matters, and so did our indirect route toward
Taejon which may have been taken either to avoid big troop
movements or to stay off heavily bombed roads.

On the way we passed six or eight different battalions of
Communist troops, all marching south. I was struck by their
excellent march discipline but also noticed that only about half
the men were armed; the weapons were about evenly divided
between rifles with long bayonets and sub-machine guns. I
could only assume that the rest expected to pick up arms from
Americans or their own fallen comrades on the battlefield.
There were no signs of heavy machine guns, mortars, or any
artillery or tanks,

It's not a long ride from Chonju to Taejon, but we took ail
night to do it, losing time for the bombers and for the stops I
had to request frequently. I was quite miserable from my
digestive troubles.

We arrived in daylight, which allowed me one special satis-
faction. At the edge of town were two tanks, both knocked
out, and I was quite sure they were the same ones that had
escaped unscathed from my pistol fire on July 20 but on which
I had called down an air strike. It was nice to know that a few

A Small Boy from Texas 103

things on that miserable day had worked according to plan.

Two other tanks still were at the main intersection, where
Clarke had measured their treads and armor, and a fifth was
still in the field near the dependent housing area. I knew the
one down between the business buildings definitely had been
knocked out, so that made six in all. I savored that figure. It
didn't win Taejon back by any means, but I was happy to
know we had at least run up some kind of a score for the day,
even while we were being run out of town.

I tried to see everything I could, but there were no answers
to some questions. There was no clue about Clarke or any of
the other men. Both the old regimental command post and the
building which had been my headquarters, across the street,
were occupied, but I couldn't tell their present use. I couldn't
tell whether the railroad was operating, and saw no prisoners,
but the whole town was full of adults, apparently in labor
gangs, moving in the direction of the railroad. There were
hundreds and hundreds of men, marching in organized groups
but with no weapons except occasional shovels.

I was taken out to an old mission schoolhouse northwest of
the center of town, near the airport. I spent the day sitting in
the office of a man who apparently was the local comman-
dant, although he wore no insignia. Officers up to the rank of
major kept reporting to him. There was no real interrogation;
but one officer who spoke some English did show up with
some photographs taken of me when I had reviewed constabu-
lary troops at Taejon in 1947. He appeared very happy to
have these and displayed them to me as special prizes.

Nobody else bothered me. I was supposed to rest and per-
haps to sleep, but found it difficult while sitting in a chair. I
was not happy to notice that the furniture had very familiar
markings the 24th Division Medical Battalion. Twice I was

1 04 General Dean's Story

served rice-and-soup meals, and in between the commandant

gave me four or five pieces of hard candy from a jar on his

desk.

One thing amazed me. An enlisted guard stayed in the room
all the time; and whenever the officer would leave, the guard
would promptly go through his desk, look through the draw-
ers, riffle papers, and calmly help himself to the officer's ciga-
rettes.

While he was busy doing this, I seized the opportunity to
reach over myself and grab some more of the candy, putting
it in my pockets. I figured that if it ever were missed the guard
would be blamed, which would be just too bad.

Even when the officer was in the room, and made the mis-
take of laying a package of cigarettes on his desk, the guard
calmly would help himself, just as he might do from his best
buddy's supply, without arousing even a complaint. I found
out as time went on that this was a regular practice in the
Inmun Gun. Maybe it's part of the Communist theory that
private property is wrong.

That night I was taken northward again, this time with new
guards, a different officer, and in a jeep which made me feel
very bad. It was marked "P-5, ipth Inf" one of our military
police jeeps. Behind the wheel was one of the world's really
rare drivers and although I was comfortably seated between
two guards in the back, the night was not precisely restful. I
had to call for stops many times. Once, in my hurry to get
out of the jeep, I caught my foot on a trailer hitch, couldn't
get my hands out in front of me in time, and fell on my head
in the road. Landing on that part of my anatomy meant that
no great damage was done.

Another odd thing about the Inmun Gun is that the driver
of a vehicle appears to be its undisputed boss no matter who's

A Small Boy from Texas 105

riding with him. An officer is just Hke any other passenger and
gives no orders.

This particular driver reminded me of the drugstore sheikh
of the 19205. His long, lank hair hung down to his neck or
to his chin when it was in disarray. To get it out of his eyes
while driving, he had a sure-fire system: he'd throw back his
head, whirl it from side to side, and the hair would fall more
or less into place all this, of course, while he continued to
push the jeep at almost the top speed it would make. Each
time I was certain he was going to go off the road.

When I wasn't hanging on, waiting for the inevitable crash,
I- had time to notice a few more satisfactory things: where
Task Force Smith and its artillery had fought near Osan, dead
tanks still proclaimed the cost of that victory to the Commu-
nists; and all up and down the highway a remarkable number
of tanks had been knocked out by aerial action. Unfortunately
there were also several U. S.-built armored vehicles, probably
those we had turned over to the ROK when we ended the
Korean occupation, also burned out in the ditches.

Somehow the driver managed to stay on the road until we
reached the suburbs of Suwon, where he whirled his head
once too often. We hit the ditch, bounced over the debris of
a wrecked tank (it sounded as if we had hit a mine), and blew
all four tires. We finished the night by walking a couple of
miles into town.

Suwon was badly smashed by air attacks, and two more
came while we were there. They both hit at the other end of
town, and I was delighted to see air activity stepping up so
much.

After breakfast at a hotel the officer went away by himself,
and I guess the two guards decided it was too much trouble to
watch me all morning. They took me down to another build-

106 General Dean's Story

ing where at least thirty Korean prisoners, all civilians, were
'wedged into one eight-by-ten room, under guard. I was put
in with them, to sit cross-legged like the silent others.

Almost immediately a young boy, twelve or fourteen years
old at most, spoke to me softly in English. We were sitting close
together. He told me that some peacetime American officer at
Ascom City, one of our military headquarters between Seoul
and Inchon, had befriended him as an orphan and had sent him
to school for a year in Texas. I think the town where he had
attended a junior high school was Austin, but I'm not sure.
He said the officer had not been able to adopt him but had
provided the year's schooling as the next best thing.

He was an intelligent-looking youngster, dressed in Amer-
ican schoolboy clothes. Now he was a political prisoner. I
started to ask him more questions, but the guard came to the
door and growled at him; and afterward the youngster whis-
pered to me, "Don't talk to me. There are snoopers in here
and they've told on me. I'll catch it now."

I managed to slip the youngster all of the hard candy I had
stolen the day before in Taejon, but I had no chance to do
anything else. My own guards returned, the escort officer with
them, and the expression on their faces announcing very
plainly that they had been chewed out thoroughly for putting
me in with the Koreans at all. After only about forty min-
utes, total time, I was taken out again.

The youngster from Texas neither waved nor changed ex-
pression when I left. The last thing he had said was that he
expected to be shot. He hoped that they would do it quickly,
without torture.

CHAPTER VI

The Battle of iJ

I have been telling my experiences in Korea in chronological
order, for the sake of simplicity, and will continue to do so;
but a more logical division of these events might be by their
character: a chase and capture, the battle of ideas, attack by
boredom, and attack by luxury. Of all these, the battle of
ideas is the one that, to my mind, has the most importance.

It began with my arrival in Chonju and the original sug-
gestion that I should broadcast on the Communist radio, and
did not end until the Communists had given me up completely,
either because I was too stubborn or too stupid for their uses.
In all its facets, certain curious elements were present; and
perhaps some of them are important as clues to the workings
of the official Communist mind.

One of the things I noticed first was that these people were
much more anxious to haA^e me say what they wanted me to
say than to extract any really new or useful information.
Pressure on me was greatest to agree to perfectly obvious
falsities: that the United States was an aggressor; that we had
exploited the people of South Korea or wished to do so; that
General Douglas Mac Arthur had ordered Syngman Rhee to
start the war. On questions of real significance our defense
plans for Japan, commitment of troops, infantry strategy or

107

io8 General Dean's Story-

organization they gave up when met with baldfaced lies or
simple refusal to answer.

I also noticed that the questioning failed completely to
evaluate known facts. It just went on and on, over and over
the same lines, even when the answers could not possibly have
made any difference. In September of 1950 Communist inter-
rogators hammered at me day after day to learn prewar plans
of the South Korean Army, which by this time were thor-
oughly out of date, or to force me to admit certain things
about the air campaign (indiscriminate bombing, for example)
on which I, an infantry officer, obviously was no authority.

There was also an almost pathological insistence on getting
something signed. I would not broadcast on the radio, there-
fore I must sign a paper saying that I would not go on the
radio. I would not sign a proposed letter, then I must sign a
letter saying 'why I would not sign a letter. I don't exaggerate:
such things were demanded. This could not have been solely
for the sake of the signature, to be transferred later to vastly
different documents. They had my signature on literally
dozens of documents from the occupation era, captured by
them at Seoul, and I had signed my name several times since
my capture. These could have been transferred to any state-
ments they liked, without even the necessity of keeping me
alive. Rather, I think that this was a business of a minor func-
tionary feeling that he must take back something to show his
superiors after an attempt to question or indoctrinate Dean.
Apparently almost any old signature would do.

Still another tactic is the obviously planned mixture of the
real with the fanciful. This may come in a questioning which
starts on topics so wild and absurd or so utterly unimportant
that even the person being interrogated gets bored with them,
and then finds himself quite suddenly on the defensive about

The Battle of Ideas 109

something quite important, not wild at all, when his guard
may be presumed to be down. Or the prisoner is threatened
with cold or starvation, and suffers both. Then he is told that
unless he cooperates, something will happen to his family in
Berkeley, California. The promise of better food brings a bit
of meat into a dull and insufficient diet and right after it
comes a promise as improbable as that he will be given a corps
command in a Communist army.

As I said, this verbal battle of ideas began at Chonju with
my first questioning and continued almost everywhere we
stopped. After I was removed from the crowded cell at
Suwon, we went back to the courtyard of the hotel, where a
sick Inmun Gun officer was stretched out on a bench under a
canvas erected as a sunshade. I was directed to another wooden
bench, and the two of us tried to sleep during most of that
fearfully hot day, although I had very little success. In the
afternoon a doctor and nurse came to give the Communist
officer a hypodermic. Then the doctor examined me, giving
my chest an especially thorough thumping, and later provided
me with more medicine, which I again believed to be salts.

Late in the day we started for Seoul. We were delayed when
we found that a pontoon bridge over the Han River near the
municipal airport no longer was passable. We joined a long
line of vehicles waiting for a hand-operated ferry farther up
the river, then got across it in reasonable time because the
officer in charge of me pulled his rank to get us past the lined-
up trucks. I noticed that many of these waiting vehicles were
driven by Inmun Gun enlisted men and were piled high with
loot and loaded with women and children. These looked like
families, complete with all their household goods, going back
to Seoul. I have no idea where they'd been, unless they were
Communist families who had pulled out of the city to avoid an

1 1 o General Dean's Story

expected battle and now were coming back while the Inmun
Gun was busy rounding up their non-Communist neighbors
for prison or execution.

I'm sorry now that I didn't pay closer attention to that
ferry. A few weeks later that hand-operated job became fa-
miliar to many Americans and helped to move much of the
yth Division, my old command, across the river as U. N. Forces,
landing at Inchon, drove the Communists out of burning
Seoul for the first time on September 26.

We entered Seoul just before midnight. The streets were
deserted. I was taken to the old municipal police department
building, where a major general greeted me pleasantly and
told me to get some sleep on a table, which I did with the
greatest of ease.

In the morning I was served an amazing meal, carried up
from the police grill. It consisted of an excellent steak, well
fried; three nice fresh eggs, turned over easy; french-fried
potatoes; and eight count them small loaves of french-type
bread. I was also handed, with considerable ceremony, a can
of evaporated milk, and a guard was insistent that I drink it--
straight.

This was the first American-type food I saw. Any portion
of it would have been sufficient for a breakfast, but I couldn't
stand to see it go away again, so I ate all of everything except
the bread. I simply couldn't get down more than a loaf and a
half of that. I secreted the other half -loaf in my pockets, but
when a soldier came to clear away the dishes he took the other
six loaves with him and I watched them go with real regret.

Then for the next several hours I was busy regretting how
much I'd eaten.

The general occupying the office where I slept apparently
had worked all night (if he slept, I don't know where or

The Battle of Ideas 1 1 1

when). In the morning another group of civilians came in,
and the general and I held what was obviously a press confer-
ence, although nobody bothered to explain it to me. Interpret-
ing was done by an elderly civilian, whose thin white beard
stuck out in bristles two inches long.

These people were interested mainly in my experiences
since I had been captured, but they also wanted to know
exactly ivh y I had permitted myself to become separated from
my own troops. I found myself angrily defending Lieutenant
Clarke and my bodyguard against the absurd claim that they
were to blame for my separation. I don't know why this was
important to the press, but they made a great point of being
critical of the men with me. They also hammered at the ques-
tion of whether I had been alone in the mountains, whether
anyone with me had escaped when I was captured. I had to be
very careful never to mention Lieutenant Tabor. I thought
he might still be at large, and I certainly didn't want to stir up
any special hunt for him.

I did say quite a lot about the terrible ride I'd had between
Chinan and Chonju in that truckload of prisoners. I said that
it was the worst ride I'd ever experienced, that the treatment
of those prisoners was brutal, but I could have saved my
breath. The minute my story began to get unpleasant, the gen-
eral spoke to the press; and although all of them had been
taking notes steadily, they all put away their pencils. Censor-
ship was working, with no arguments.

Then my questioners did one of those incomprehensible
things which just don't make any sense, no matter how you
figure them. One of them I think it was the general himself
said, "Would you like to see Ahn Chai Hong and Kim Kyn
Sik?"

I said, "Not particularly."

1 1 2 General Dean's Story

In prewar days these men had been South Korean leaders of
importance with whom I had worked as military governor. I
had liked them both and respected Ahn especially as an in-
tense patriot and a brave man. Kim Kyu Sik was an elderly
man, a leader of stature equal to or greater than Syngman
Rhee's in the days of the formation of the South Korean gov-
ernment. He had fought that formation because he thought it
would mean permanent partition of the country. A doctor of
philosophy, he had headed the interim assembly. Using Eng-
lish, he had been an orator of exceptional ability.

I certainly had no desire to see either of them under these
circumstances. Nevertheless, Ahn obviously also a prisoner
and being detained in this same building was hauled in. He
looked at me with the most shamed face I've ever seen. I said,
"How do you do, Mr. Ahn. I'm sorry to see you under these
circumstances."

He made no audible reply. I had always admired this man,
although he was stubborn. Now he must have been terrified,
because his palm was clammy when we shook hands.

That was all there was to it and its purpose escaped me.
There could not have been any doubt of my identification by
this time. Perhaps they just wanted to watch us squirm. Kim
Kyu Sik was ill at his home, I was told, so he wasn't brought
around.

Later both these men went north to cooperate with the
Communists. Kim Kyu Sik died very soon after going north,
but I've been told that Ahn is now a Communist commissar of
some sort. This is difficult for me to understand; but I'm sure
somebody must have convinced him, somehow, that commu-
nism was the best thing for his country.

1 had all the comforts of home that morninganother shave
and hair trim, and a chance to wash. In the afternoon another

The Battle of Ideas 1 1 3

major general showed up to question me, mostly about mili-
tary matters. He made a great point of wanting to know
exactly when my division had come to Korea, and I could see
that he was working to prove we had moved before the United
Nations gave full approval. I suddenly developed a very bad
memory for dates.

When he asked about the strength of the 24th Division I
decided to take a little wind out of his sails. The North
Koreans were so cocky about having pushed us back that I
knocked three or four thousand off our actual strength. I said
we had eight thousand men, but that by no means all of those
were combat soldiers the division included ordnance, signal
men, and many others. I tried to get across the idea, "You
boys aren't really as good as you think you are."

He pulled out one of our tables of organization and began
reading off unit sizes, but I stopped him. "Oh no," I said, "that
table is only for war. We didn't expect a war, so we came
under strength. I want you to remember that the Inmun Gun
has not done as well as you think, because you weren't fight-
ing the numbers you thought you were."

I had tried not to knock off too many numbers, but to make
it sound just barely reasonable. I thought I was getting along
quite well with all this when he threw me a real curve. He
said, "Did you personally explain to your men why they are
fighting? Do your officers and men know why they are
fighting?"

That was a telling point, because I hadn't. I had done so
when we were fighting in Europe, and in Japan had made a
point of explaining personally to each replacement exactly the
theory of our duty as occupation troops. But here in Korea I
just hadn't gotten around to any such explanations. I had
talked to most of the officers and headquarters groups, but all

1 1 4 General Dean's Story

I could do was hope that the regimental and company officers
had done such explaining to most of the men. I remembered
that at an early briefing some officer had asked me, "Just why
are we fighting?" And I had said, "That's a tough question.
Why do you think?"

He had said, "We're fighting for liberty," and I'd agreed
that this was as good an answer as any.

I lied like a trooper to this Communist general, but I also
made a personal resolution never to let that explanation detail
slide again, no matter how tough the situation or how little
time I had. That question really hurt me, and I hated like sin
to have to look that buzzard in the eye and say, "Of course I
did."

But he switched immediately from the important to the
innocuous. His next question was, "How did you identify
yourself when you were up front? How could people tell you
were a general?"

I said, "I had two little stars on my helmet."

He said, "How did you identify your jeep?"

I said I'd had stars on that.

He asked, "Leather cushions?"

I said I couldn't remember whether they were leather.

That evening I was ordered downstairs, and the general of
the Inmun Gun went with me. In front of the building he
asked, "Did you ever see this before?"

There was my own jeep that old White (Corporal Mal-
colm D. White, my driver) had been so proud of, still with
the leather cushions and the spick-and-span numbers on the
front. The general presented me with my own two-star license
plate and handed me my own helmet with the two stars in
front and the taro-leaf insignia (distinguishing mark of the

The Battle of Ideas 1 1 5

24th Division) on the side. He said, "You can have these for

souvenirs."

Then I was directed to a three-quarter-ton truck, while he
drove off in my jeep. I never did get a chance to find out
whether those unawarded medals might still be secreted in the
jeep somewhere, but I doubt that they were.

The two major generals at Seoul were of the two principal
branches of the North Korean services. The man who had
welcomed me was a member of the Security Police, which in
time of peace does rural police work and furnishes border
guards, operating independently of the Army, but In time of
war is called in for various duties, including management of
prisoner-of-war camps. These people are recognizable by their
green shoulder tabs. The Inmun Gun, or Regular Army,
wears red tabs; and the general who had my jeep was one of
these regular officers.

Now that my identity had been established definitely,
obviously there was a plan to defer to rank in rny case. The
deference, so far as the truck ride north from Seoul was
concerned, consisted of placing a wobbly kitchen chair in
the exact center of the truck. I was ordered to sit on this; and
a six-man guard, armed with four sub-machine guns and two
rifles, found seats on the floor all around me. We headed
north.

Once again the driver of the truck was the person I
watched. An officer sat with him in the front seat of the
truck but said very little and did nothing. The driver was
boss. I always remember him as the Singing Driver, in con-
trast to the Hairy Driver, who had run us into the ditch below
Suwon. This fellow was also a most un-Korean type of
Korean: he even acted as if women were human. Specifically,

1 1 6 General Dean's Story

he stopped to pick up a girl hitch-hiker, giving her a favored
seat on his left side, even though the English-speaking officer
obviously was opposed to the whole idea. But again the
supremacy of North Korean drivers was quite evident, and
the girl got in. If the people who later hinted about giving me
commands in the North Korean Army really had been smart,
they'd have offered me a job driving a truck. If I'm ever in
that army, that's what I want to do. Truck drivers have it all
over officers.

At any rate, the girl snuggled up to the driver, playing up
to him in a fashion you might expect in a Western country,
but hardly in the Orient. It worked. She rode all the way to
the north side of the Imjin River in one of the best seats. If
the officer was crowded, that was just too bad.

The guards apparently were men going home on leave.
Before we left Seoul I'd noticed that they were showing each
other photographs, apparently of girl friends, and exchanging
addresses. Among them was a barracks-room bully, who
would have had a rough time in our own Army. One of the
smaller men displayed a photograph, and this big fellow not
only snatched it to look at, but refused to give it back. The
poor little devil did everything he could, but never could get
it away from him.

The guards pooled their money everyone seemed to have
bales of it and sent one fellow out to buy some dried fish and
hard crackers. As we rode north they ate the fish, offering me
pieces of it. I couldn't get this down but managed some of
the crackers, which were like hardtack.

They also sang. It seemed to me that all the songs were
political, in one way or another. There was the Inmun Gun
marching air, and another about Kim Sung Soo, one of South
Korea's outstanding leaders, which was like a hate song, or

The Battle of Ideas 1 1 7

perhaps even unprintable. Another, sung with the same inflec-
tion and undoubtedly a hate song, was u E-Syngman." Koreans
usually reverse the order of names, placing the family desig-
nation first. And a single character may be translated Rhee,
Dee (or Di), or just as E. Thus this song title, although sung
with the syllables widely separated, actually is only the name
of President Syngman Rhee but I doubt very much that he
would have enjoyed it. There was also a song about Stalin,
but I could tell that this was quite different, with Stalin being
extolled. Whether they're still singing it, now that Stalin is
being officially deglainourized by the Communists, I can only
guess.

The driver loved to sing with them, especially those songs
which concerned the Inmun Gun. This I wouldn't have
minded, but each time he joined the singing he would lift his
head to bay out the choruses toward the stars and take his
eyes completely off the road. Each time I was quite sure we'd
hit the ditch.

We had trouble getting across the Imjin River, but finally
made it through a ford. The girl hitch-hiker left us on the
north side. We continued on to a town which I believe was
Paekchon (just south of the 38th parallel and west of Kae-
song), although it could have been another village in the same
vicinity. This was a roundabout route to Pyongyang, the
reason for which was not clear to me. At any rate, we stopped
for an hour or two, parking in the yard in front of a police
station while the escort officer went inside. I shall never forget
that town, for one reason. All the time we sat there someone
was screaming inside the jail. It was screaming even worse
than that I had heard coming from the tank we had hit at
Taejon, and it kept on monotonously. This was no child, no
wounded soldier. This was someone being cruelly tortured;

1 1 8 General Dean's Story

and whatever they were doing to him continued intermit-
tently all the time we were there.

Finally we went on again. The kitchen chair had not been
equal to the bumps and twists that truck driver had managed
to put into the road and was about to fall apart. I talked the
guards into throwing it away (with the officer, who knew
how to speak English but obviously didn't wish to, providing
grudging translation in monosyllables) and sat on the floor
with the enlisted men. Shortly I was a little sorry I had, for as
soon as I tried to stretch out, all six of them were on top of
me. They meant nothing by it. It was just their way with each
other, but they were like a ball of puppies or a bunch of
snakes, arms and legs everywhere and all on top of me. I was
nauseated and weak, and this made the nightmare night even
worse. The autumn chill was increasing at night, although the
days still were fairly warm.

The men went on singing, and the driver went on flirting
with ditches every time he raised his head to give voice. This
even affected the uncommunicative officer. I said that I thought
they must have searched for a week to find such a rotten
driver, and the officer agreed with me. They had succeeded,
he said, in finding the worst driver in Seoul.

At another time he did mention that the weather was much
colder in the north, and that although the springs and autumns
were beautiful, the country was too hot in summer and too
cold in winter that Korea, in fact, had a terrible climate. It
was my turn to agree with him. Otherwise he volunteered no
information, not even about where he had learned English,
and I wasn't curious. Perhaps if I had guessed how long it
would be before I had a chance to speak English regularly
again, I would have tried to start more conversation.

I got some relief from that pile of snakelike humans because

The Battle of Ideas 1 1 9

of my dysentery. On that trip I had to ask the driver to stop
seven or eight times. There was a much longer rest from them
just before morning. As we were dropping down into a long
valley the driver finally sang once too often, or lifted his head
too far, and ran us off the road into a rice paddy. The truck
turned over. But this was a vehicle without a top, like most
of them in North Korea, and we were all thrown clear.
Nobody had anything land on him, but one man in the front
seat hurt his ribs. He was in pain and moaned all the rest of
the night.

The guards succeeded in shoving the truck back on its
wheels but could not get the engine started again. I think the
exhaust pipe must have been clogged. So we walked seven or
eight miles to a town which I was told was named Oreo, al-
though I've never been able to locate it on a map. I made eight
more dysentery stops during the hike and I think the guard
more or less appreciated them, for the officer had been march-
ing us all at a very fast pace. He was the only one who ap-
peared to mind the delays.

I was taken to a hotel in the town just at daybreak, was
given breakfast, and spent the day there. The hotel was built
around a court, and all day long the town children wandered
in and out, coming to stare at me. A prisoner must have been
a curiosity, and the word had got around. In the afternoon
the parade became so constant that the officer aroused me
and took me down to the center of town so everybody could
have a look. Nobody threw anything, nor even jeered. They
only stared, like people looking at a monkey in a zoo. I think
I must have been ahead of the infamous prisoner inarches
which later covered more or less this same route.

During the day someone repaired the truck, and that night
we drove on to Pyongyang, crossing a pontoon bridge to get

i2o General Dean's Story

into the city, and arriving about ten o'clock. First we stopped
in front of a large building, which I was told was the Security
Police headquarters (although other accounts mentioning this
building refer to it as the Secret Police headquarters); the
officer went in to report, while a guard and I sat outside in
the truck parked under a tree. Presently another officer and
two guards came out, and we were driven to a house near
Liberation Park (a park that became familiar to Americans
a couple of months later during the brief occupation of Pyong-
yang, captured by the Eighth Army on October 19 during
its push toward the Yalu River). The house was directly
across the river from a large airfield, and not far from Kim II
Sung University.

Here I was greeted by a very pleasant-appearing Korean in
civilian clothes. He said, "I'll be your interpreter here. Fm
here to make you comfortable." He did not identify himself,
and later, when he did tell his name, Lee Kyu Hyun, he asked
me never to use it, as he was under orders not to tell it to me.

This was a Western-style house, two rooms with a double
door between them. Again there was an Army cot for me,
complete with mattress, pillows, and sheets, and a couple of
overstuffed chairs and some straight chairs. Lee asked me if
I wanted to go to bed immediately. I said, u Show me the
latrine first. The way I feel, Fll need that often."

When I got to bed there was no problem except the lights,
which were ordered left on so that a guard who stayed in the
room could see me at all times. Another guard was outside
the house; and Lee and another civilian, who carried a pistol
on his hip and was apparently in charge of affairs, also slept in
the house the man in charge usually just falling asleep in one
of the easy chairs.

Breakfast was served to Lee and me together, and he told

The Battle of Ideas 1 2 1

me that he had been a professor of literature at Kim II Sung
University, but had been drafted by the Inmun Gun at the
outbreak of war. He had been translating captured documents,
he said, but wouldn't be any more specific. He said he hadn't
seen any other prisoners before I arrived.

Later I was told that the North Koreans had captured many
secret documents, both from our Embassy in Seoul and the
headquarters of the Korean Military Advisory Group
(KMAG). I can't guess whether the Embassy documents
were important, but would guess that those in KMAG head-
quarters concerned principally South Korean military plan-
ning, and therefore would have been thoroughly out of date
by the time the Reds got them.

I saw no Russians in Pyongyang, and the anti-aircraft fire
sounded weak. I was in no position to find out whether those
batteries actually were manned by Russians, as some of our
people were told when the United Nations captured the city,
but they could have been.

From Lee I received the first inkling of what the war meant
to middle-class North Koreans. He was very much concerned
about his wife and a baby born in June. He had not been able
to see his wife since the war began but knew that she had no
milk for the child (extremely unusual for a Korean woman)
and had not been able to find any fresh or preserved milk, so
was trying to raise the youngster on rice broth. She and the
baby were with her parents in a village about twenty miles
away, but Lee never was given leave to go to see them.

Lee expressed great surprise about me. He had been briefed
on me, he said, and had been told that I was a tough, rugged
individual who liked only rough outdoor sports an uncul-
tured type. He was amazed when I asked for something to
read and promised to bring me something the next day. He

1 2 2 General Dean's Story

also was amazed that I cared for music or painting, and could
not understand how in the world anyone who believed in
"pure culture," literature and the arts, could also be a profes-
sional soldier.

He managed to let me know that he had some culture. He
had been to school in Japan, where he learned English; had
visited Moscow; and had taken post-graduate work at Kim
II Sung University.

On that first day Lee brought me a good tan, summer-
weight civilian suit, with a Seoul tailor's name on it. It fitted
well, except in the waist, and I had to tuck the top of the trou-
sers inside my belt. There was also a nice shirt, of some material
like nylon. The tailoring on this was special: the sleeves were
too long for my thirty-five-inch arms, but the tail was so
short I couldn't keep it inside my trousers. Lee also gave me
a necktie, so I was a natty-looking individual.

On the second day he brought some reading matter a
novel, Allitet Takes to the Hill, and the July issue of a Soviet
magazine, Neivs. The latter contained stories of strikes in
Japan and stevedores refusing to load military cargoes for
Korea, articles about a proposed international anti-atom-bomb
pledge, and others criticizing the United Nations for inter-
fering in Korea.

I read anything they'd let me read. I was interested in
finding out what modern communism was all about. You
can't fight something intelligently unless you know what it
is. In the United States we can't afford to be so ignorant. Be-
fore I was a prisoner I didn't know what the Reds were talk-
ing about, what they meant when they said "Leninism." I
had studied Marxism when it was still taught at the University
of California as a political science course, but their interpre-
tation of Leninism was all new to me. Not one officer in a

The Battle of Ideas 123

thousand in our Army-and, If anything, an even smaller per-
centage of civilians in the United States-has any idea of what
they mean. So I read everything I could. I'm an authority now
on the history of the Communist party and much of its
doctrine.

Just for the record, later on one of the things the Commu-
nists were always yapping about to me was "McCarthyism."
All I could say was, "Who the hell's McCarthy? I never
heard of him." He became a political figure after my capture.

In one of my first conversations with Lee I repeated my
request to be taken to a prisoner-of-war camp, and I remem-
ber his answer very well. He said, "Oh, the men In your
camps are very happy, very merry, very cheerful, happy.
They're whistling and singing and cracking jokes all the time."
But he did not say anything about taking me to join them.
Instead he brought me a novel, Port Arthur, which concerned
the 352-day siege of that city in the Russo-Japanese war. Pos-
sibly it was intended to take my mind off the current conflict.

On September 6 I had a very important visitor: a four-star
colonel (equivalent to our rank of brigadier general) named
Kim. I have every reason to remember this man, and I'm sure
I could pick him out of any crowd. I know the way he fumes
when he is angry, the unctuous approach he uses when he's
trying to wheedle, the manner in which spittle foams out of
his mouth when he's threatening yet I find it difficult to
describe him. Perhaps it's like trying to describe someone very
close to you. You find yourself thinking, "Well, she just looks
like June," or, "Well, he's just an ordinary man." For quite
different reasons, I feel somewhat the same about this Kim:
he's just an ordinary Korean, although I'm quite sure that I'll
be able to reach out a beckoning finger when I see him again.
And 111 be waiting for that day.

124 General Dean's Story

Not that he was unpleasant at first. Quite the contrary. He
was friendly, kindly, interested in my welfare and left me a
thick folder of alleged copies of statements by American
prisoners of war. These statements all concerned a resolution,
said to have been approved at a mass meeting of prisoners,
calling for American troops to cease fighting. Some eight hun-
dred typed signatures were attached, many of them names of
officers and men I had known in the 24th Division. Quite a
few were men I thought had been killed in the fighting.

The resolution was wordy, but the general idea can be
conveyed by the opening statement: "We were brought here
under the assumption that North Koreans had started the war;
but we found out after we arrived that the war was in fact
started by the South Koreans, who were the aggressors and
have been for some time."

Colonel Kim's request (I give his rank each time I mention
him in order to avoid confusion with many other Kims, but
this indicates no special respect on my part) was simple: I
should sign the petition and go on the radio to notify my
family that I was alive and to tell the people of the United
States that we should stop fighting. He said, "Now I'll give
you time to look these over and to think them over."

Also in the folder was a long statement allegedly signed by
Philip Deane, a British war correspondent captured by the
Communists in the early days of the fighting. This was highly
critical of Americans, discussed his own capture, and quoted
some U. S. sergeant as saying that we had been too busy bring-
ing post-exchange supplies to Korea to take time to tell our
soldiers what the war was about, and that we had sent troops
in to fight without proper preparation. It also lauded North
Koreans for their care of prisoners and the wounded. I didn't
know what I was supposed to do about this, so I did nothing.

The Battle of Ideas 1 2 5

The next morning we moved again, this time to a church
building in the village of Sunan, about sixteen miles north of
Pyongyang. Even before we left the house, the rag on the
floor of my room and some of the furniture had been taken
away; and when we reached the church these akeady had
been set in place by the pistol-toting civilian and a truck crew.
The church was divided by a rough board partition, full of
cracks and knotholes, at the chancel. In the portion of the
church where the congregation normally sits, the guards-
some twenty or twenty-five men were housed, without fur-
niture, sleeping on the floor. The chancel area, about twelve
by twenty feet, was for me; and here were the rug and fur-
nishings from the house near Liberation Park. Directly behind
the chancel was another partition, and a room about seven
by twenty feet, where Lee slept. Beside the church and only
a few yards from it was a small Korean-type house that was
used as a cook-shack; there was no provision for heat or cook-
ing in the church building. The two structures sat in a grove
of chestnut trees, and the chestnut crop was ripe.

One guard was always in my room, and the light burned
constantly. Lee told me that we had moved because of the
increased bombing of Pyongyang, including the use of anti-
personnel, air-bursting bombs. 1 had noticed that for two or
three days previously, bombing had been more frequent than
before, most of it by small propellor-driven planes and some
jets working over the airfield. Often the jets would get in
before the air-raid warning sounded. Our house was shaken,
but none of the bombs hit especially close. Lee told me, how-
ever, that the bombers were destroying the city. He was
worried about his own family and friends, especially about
his father, who was still living there. On the day we moved
he told me, "Yesterday the bombers hit the section where

126 General Dean's Story

my father Is. I hope he wasn't killed." Apparently he had no

method of getting any direct information.

I failed to mention that before we moved another doctor
had come to see me, given my chest one more good thumping,
and left some powders for me to take. My digestive troubles
had increased, and I was fast growing weaker. I don't think
I weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds when I was
captured (my normal prewar weight being about two hundred
and ten), and ten days of uninterrupted dysentery certainly
hadn't allowed me to gain any of it back again.

When the very polite and kindly Colonel Kim came to see
me again, a day or so later, he insisted that I take a walk with
him. I tried but simply could not keep going after fifty or a
hundred yards. So we stopped at a point from which we
could look down over the valley surrounding Sunan; and
while we sat there he gave me a lecture on the virtues of
communism.

He wondered if I had not noticed a vast difference between
South and North Korea. I told him that although I had been
traveling only at night, and could not see much, the farm
houses in North Korea looked much poorer to me and that I
thought the people lacked comforts of life which farmers in
South Korea took as a matter of course.

That didn't please him at all. He pointed out a housing
project being constructed near Sunan as an example of what
communism was doing for the people. He also said that al-
though we might talk about communism, using the term
loosely, North Korea actually wasn't a true Communist state,
because people could still own their own homes and there
was sanctity of private property. The only feature of true
state socialism, he said, was that all land was owned by the
state and had been so subdivided that each man now farmed

The Battle of Ideas 1 2 7

his own, paying nothing in the way of rent or taxes except
one-fourth of his annual crop. No landlord could exploit an-
other man by having his land worked for him; all large indus-
tries and public utilities such as railroads were owned by the
state; women had full equality with men; and industrial work-
ers had priority at state-operated food stations. I should, he
said, see the light and realize how wonderful all of this really
was. It was a long, exhaustive lecture, and I was exhausted.
And I thought mostly, when I thought at all, about my diges-
tive tract, which did not feel good.

We finally went back to the church for lunch. It was deli-
ciousthere was even boiled beef, the first meat I had seen
since I left Seoul. After lunch the colonel asked if I had signed
the petition asking our people to stop fighting. When I said
that I had not, I could see he thought he had wasted his boiled
beef.

About September 10 Colonel Kirn came back again; and
this time all he wanted was my signature on a couple of long
written statements, which he said were precisely the same
things I had told him in conversation. One was to the effect
that we were maiding a mistake by fighting in Korea, battling
not only North Korea but actually fighting against South
Korea's interests and desires too. The other was even more
simple: Syngman Rhee was no good, a rascal, a crook, a senile
old man, a thief who looked after only his own personal
interests.

Somehow all I could remember about our previous conver-
sation was what he had told me, not what I'd told himand
certainly not these statements. But the colonel made every-
thing exceptionally clear. "These," he said, "represent my
minimum requests. If you sign these, you'll go to a prisoner-
of-war camp immediately and you won't be tortured."

128 General Dean's Story

Well, that Insertion about torture wasn't exactly a reassur-
ing note, but we didn't get anywhere that day, although he
spent most of the afternoon working on the problem inter-
mittently. His pushing wasn't constant, but it was wearing as
hell. He didn't shout or scream, but he wasn't quite the kindly
friend he had been previously except for a few minutes,
when he suddenly asked whether I liked to drink.

I said, u No. I seldom drink any hard liquor. I do like a
little something sherry wine, perhaps before dinner, but
that's usually all."

This confused him a little, I could see; but he wasn't stopped
entirely. "Then," he said, "all you have to do Is to sign these
statements, and your troubles will be over. Sign, and you'll
be taken to a nice house in the country. It's a fine house, and
you'll have an easy and pleasant life, just living there until
the war is over. Nobody will be shooting at you, and you'll
be in no danger of being killed. Also, there will be plenty of
fine sherry wine to drink."

He embroidered that house-in-the-country picture quite a
lot, but I think he was a little troubled because he couldn't
stock the cellar with scotch or vodka.

For two more days the colonel stayed at the church, alter-
nately being persuasive, dangling in front of me this hope for
a lazy country life with a bottle of sherry, then shifting over
to the crimes being committed by the United Nations In the
war mostly, the bombing of schools and churches.

Here I think I should digress a moment to explain state-
ments that must be made in the rest of this book. During the
next three years I had a true worm's-eye view of our air war.
Obviously, being unable to see much or to move far, I was in
no position to evaluate the effects of bombing as a whole. I
could see only what was right in front of me, I knew only the

The Battle of Ideas 129

effect of bombing on a few people, with whom I had direct
contact. So when I say that bombers missed or hit an apparent
target, or that bombing increased the hatred which one of a
thousand Kims had for the United States, no over-all criticism
of aerial warfare is meant or implied. The importance of an
individual miss or a single person being confirmed in his
communism as a result of bombing can be judged only in
relation to thousands of such bits of information. The fact
that a bomber did miss, or a man did lose his wife and chil-
dren, must be told, however, in order to understand what
happened to the people around me, and how they thought.

But no one should forget that for three years those jets and
bombers in the skies were my only link with my country. In
all that time there was no sweeter sight to me than the vapor
trail of a Sabre or the fiery fall of a MIG, no sound lovelier
than the solid whuummp! of a salvo of bombs falling just over
the next hill. Those were my people working, and I cheered
them, every one.

At Sunan, however, it did seem to me that there was a good
deal of bombing being wasted on the roads when I could still
hear switch engines chuffing up and down on the undamaged
railroad. The noise of those locomotives, coming after a flight
of bombers had left, hurt me, personally; although of course
I merely had to assume that the railroad actually had not been
hurt. For all that I know definitely, they may have been
chuffing up and down on the only bit of track left to them,
and accomplishing nothing.

During this time bed was still the greatest thing in the
world to me. My cares all seemed to drop away if I could get
back to that cot and sleep, endlessly.

About eleven-thirty one night Colonel Kim spoiled it. He
came storming in, got me up, and wasn't in the least friendly

130 General Dean's Story

any more. "Now," he said, "I want you to sign this request

to stop bombing our innocent villages."

I said, "Nobody will believe it, if I sign anything like that.
If I could get back to my own people, however, I certainly
would advise them to concentrate more on military targets.
Fm sure those are the orders, but sometimes there are errors.
I'd like to get back so that I could tell them."

He kept on arguing, insisting that I sign a statement. I was
very tired and sick, but I don't intend to alibi I merely got
what seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, but less so later.
I said, "No, I won't sign a statement, but I 'will write a letter
to General Walker, if you'll get It delivered. I'm sure you can
do that, the way your people infiltrate. I'll bet you could send
somebody down there and hand it to him, by hand. I'll write a
letter to General Walker, right now."

My belief that the Communists could infiltrate almost at
will had a good deal of early evidence to support it. In the
first hours of the war I was shown Communist handbills, clear
down at Pusan, which were being used to frighten workers
on our airfield. Thousands of these, which read, roughly,
"You'll die, you dog, for helping the Americans," were put in
the hands of these Pusan laborers even before the battle line
had moved south of the Han River, at Seoul. And all the
while I was with troops, we were harassed constantly by
roadblocks and snipers who went around our lines or right
through them as infiltrators, with a minimum of difficulty.

I guess that letter from Sunan was a silly thing, but I did
write it. I wrote along these lines:

Dear General Walker: Unfortunately I was captured on the
zjth of August. It was a physical capture. I was overpowered on
my attempt to get back through the lines. [I did want both Gen-

The Battle of Ideas 1 3 1

eral Walker and my own son to know that I had not surren-
dered.] I've been well treated but I'm anything but happy at being
a prisoner of war. I urge that you impress upon the Air the neces-
sity to confine our attacks to military targets. William F. Dean.

I don't think I ever would have written this letter if I had
been fully awake. Afterward I was much troubled by it. I
thought those damned fools just might put it through, and if
they did, I only hoped that General Walker would under-
stand what I was talking about that I wanted more and better
bombing, not less of it.

As I've said, almost any signature would satisfy these peo-
ple. This letter stopped Kim's harangue; and as I was going
back to bed the interpreter, Lee, said, "All Korean people
will love you for this." But so far as I can learn, they never
did anything with it. Don't ask me why.

I have thought many times of this letter. I have no alibi for
having written it; but I certainly want to emphasize that I
keenly regretted having done so immediately after the deed.
In fact, the following days were a veritable nightmare because
of my reviling myself for having so written. One of the most
difficult problems for a prisoner is that of maintaining his
judgment. You have no one on whom to test your ideas be-
fore turning them into decisions. A thought, which normally
you would discard as soon as you saw that it affected listeners
adversely, balloons in your mind until you are sure it must
be exceptionally clever. And sober reflection, which might
show it up as being both foolish and dangerous rather than
clever, just isn't possible under prison conditions. Of course
Fin sorry I wrote that letter. It did no good and might have
done great harm.

But this night was just a starter for Kim. He was there al-
most every day after that, and the mask of friendliness was

1 3 2 General Dean's Story

gone. Paraphrased, what he had to say again and again was,
"I've got you now. You can't back down. I'm going to dis-
credit you. You've lost all dignity, so you might as well sign
anything I put in front of you. You signed one thing, so I've
got you. I've never lost on a man yet, I've never failed to
obtain my objective, and I've had them tougher than you."
Often this harangue was delivered just after he'd shaken me
awake in the middle of the night.

I signed only one thing more for him, however, and again
I thought that I was being real cute. Kim had been after me
about the alleged hatred of South Koreans for Americans and
wanted me to sign a prepared statement that we should with-
draw from the peninsula. I was feeling very cagey, so I said
that I wouldn't sign that, but I would write one similar to it.
In my own handwriting I made another statement. As nearly
as I can remember I worded it:

The United States has lost favor in the eyes of South Koreans,
who have seen their own nationals from the North win apparent
military successes in the South; and this has given them a national
consciousness. Many South Koreans through fear have outwardly
manifested hostility to all Americans; and if we drive only to the
38th parallel, it will be only a matter of time until we have the
same problem again, because the seeds of communism have been
planted in the South. I base this observation merely upon my
experiences when I was harried for thirty-five days in the moun-

tains.

Again I attached my signature and with it, an invisible
hope that if the statement ever reached anybody who mat-
tered, he would be able to see that I was trying to urge our
people to come north of the parallel, not to stop at it, at the
same time covering the thought with enough meaningless
words to confuse the Communists.

The Battle of Ideas 1 3 3

At the time I thought this note was really quite clever, and
Colonel Kim was obviously so pleased that I hoped it might
work. He went away, carrying that statement like a treasure,
but was back a couple of days later, fuming mad. I guess he
had showed it to somebody who understood the English lan-
guage well enough to see what I was trying to do. Kim said I
was a running dog of Wall Street, and various other things.
My statement was no good at all and would do great harm.
He was displeased with me.

On the night of September 14 he got me out of bed again
and ordered me taken to Pyongyang, while he departed in
another vehicle. The truck which carried me stopped first at
a building near the river, where an officer did some compli-
cated telephoning before my guards took me any farther. I
judged that this was to set up final arrangements for what was
to come later, but was told nothing. While we were waiting
there, Lee pointed to some nearby buildings, which could have
been factories or some sort of dormitories. He said, "That's
where the American prisoner-of-war camp is." He did not
elaborate, and of course I saw no prisoners in the middle of
the night.

Later we went across town, to the same building where I
had waited when I first was brought to Pyongyang, the Secu-
rity Police headquarters. Here, to my astonishment, a sentry
actually saluted me, although I was in those summer-weight
civilian clothes. I was taken to an enormous room where a
lieutenant general was seated at a massive table. He was intro-
duced to me as General Pak (although from later information
I believe he actually was Lieutenant General Pang Ha Sae,
head of the Security Forces) . The general invited me to sit
down. He said he understood that I had refused to "cooper-
ate" (whenever I use this word, I'm referring to the Comrnu-

134 General Dean's Story

nists' term, not one of my own choosing), but he was sure
that I would cooperate with him. He wanted, he said, to know
three things: What were American intentions in the Far East?
What secret weapons did we possess? What was the plan of
maneuver for U. S. Forces in Korea?

As I think about it now, there may have been a special rea-
son for that last question, on September 15. The tide of war
was turning and IL S. Marines and soldiers were either land-
ing at Inchon or steaming toward it in the flanking amphibious
assault that broke the back of the North Korean Army in
1950. As the minimum, North Korean intelligence must have
guessed that something was going on and must have been
highly curious about the location of a couple of divisions they
knew to be in the Far East but hadn't seen on the southern
battle lines for a while. So I don't wonder that the general
wanted to know our plan of maneuver. As a matter of fact,
I was curious about it myself, but for obvious reasons rather
glad I didn't know just then.

I told him that I didn't have any of this information, but
succeeded only in bringing on a harangue, which was broken
only when I had to excuse myself to go to the latrine. This
was one activity with which none of my interrogators ever
felt inclined to interfere.

The gist of what the general had to say the rest of the night
was that I was completely at their mercy, they were going to
try me as a war criminal for things I had done as military
governor in 1948, nobody would know what had happened
to me because the American newspapers and radio already
had reported me as dead, and they had "trained operators"
who would make me talk, whether I wanted to or not.

Finally he said that he would give me a few minutes to
think things over. I was taken to an anteroom and given a cup

The Battle of Ideas 1 3 5

of tea. I was so very tired I went to sleep sitting there. Lee
said I snored.

After a few minutes I was awakened and led in to see the
general again. When I said I had not changed my mind about
talking he was angry. He said, "You won't talk?"

"No."

"Then you must sign a statement saying f why you won't
talk."

I said that would be all right with me. On a paper I wrote:

Fortunately I do not know the information you seek. But even if
I did, I would not give it to you, because by so doing I would be
a traitor to my country. So help me God. William F. Dean.

Lee, the interpreter, captured later by American forces
when they took Pyongyang, said of this incident: "General
Dean disclosed nothing. He was given two days to change
his attitude and reminded that the American press and radio
had reported him dead, so it was left to the Communist peo-
ple to dispose of him as they saw fit."

CHAPTER VII

Colonel Kim ana Friends

Once again, my signature for the general at Pyongyang seemed
to get him off some sort of hook, and they let me go back
to Sunan, where another doctor came to see me. He struck
me as having more sense than the previous medical visitors.
He did give my chest the usual thorough thumping, but he
also took some specimens and asked me what our doctors
would do in a similar case. When I told him sulfathiazol,
he nodded his head knowingly at least he'd heard of the med-
icine. He put me on a chook diet chook is rice cooked until
it is soft and gummy, with lots of water in it. Nobody likes
this, and I was no exception, but it was all I got for days.

Then the delightful Colonel Kim came back. He was still
wondering if I would cooperate, and I signed another note
saying that I would not, that I had not changed my mind, that
I had no information and would not give them any if I did.

Kim went away, but that night September 1 6 returned
with three other officers. They set up a table in the room
where the guards were sleeping and for hours pored over
papers. Colonel Kim came into my room once to tell me,
"Well, tomorrow we're going to interrogate you. I have
trained assistants who are going to get what we want to
know."

136

Colonel Kim and Friends 1 3 7

I thought the next day might be tough, so I went to bed and
got some sleep.

They started about nine o'clock in the morning, after spend-
ing a couple of hours getting their papers in order. There
were three interrogators working in shifts: two lieutenant
colonels, Choi and Hong, and a Major Kim, just to confuse
the name situation. A second interpreter, Tal, came along to
spell Lee.

The interrogation took place in my room. I sat on a straight
chair (which had been hand-made by somebody who hated
the human race and wanted to make all members of it uncom-
fortable) facing a table, with one of the interrogators on the
other side. The interpreter also sat in a straight chair, at one
side; and a guard usually stood, holding his sub-machine gun.
When Colonel Kim came in now and then to see how
they were getting along, he'd loll in one of the easy chairs.
The room was icy I would guess the temperature at about
thirty-three degrees above zero and the Koreans all wore
heavy overcoats. I started out in my summer suit, and sock-
footed. In all Korean houses the removal of shoes is a pre-
requisite to polite entry. To me, it was even more important
to have my shoes off, for my infected left foot had not been
treated and was now the size of a small balloon. My weight
loss had left no padding on my hip bones, and when that
home-made chair became unbearable I would sit on both
hands, which also swelled to twice their normal size.

Lieutenant Colonel Choi began the questioning, using a
prepared list of inquiries, mostly about military matters. The
session lasted four hours, broken only when I had to go to the
latrine, at which times a guard accompanied me.

Choi started easily, and typically. Who, he wanted to know,
had been the assistant commander and the artillery commander

1 3 8 General Dean's Story

when I had the jth Division In South Korea in the autumn of
1948? I asked him if he had not read the newspapers. Those
names had been in them, numerous times, but I couldn't re-
member them, certainly, after such a long time.

Incidentally, Colonel Kim had prefaced the actual interro-
gation by giving me a small and informative lecture. More
than forty members of the South Korean Assembly, he told
me, had come north voluntarily and were now enrolled in
the Communist cause. Furthermore, he had absolute proof that
the war had been started on the orders of General MacArthur.
This "proof" consisted of a typed statement, allegedly made
by a man (whose name I don't remember now) who had been
in the South Korean government as one of the various minis-
ters. The statement declared that he (the statement signer)
knew Syngman Rhee had gone to Tokyo early in June and
had received orders to begin the war, to invade North Korea
prior to July i . I repeat these claims endlessly and to the point
of boredom because these were essential parts of the Commu-
nists' carefully prepared "prooffor the benefit of their own
people rather than the International community that South
Korea had started the war. Through tiresome and endless
repetition of such trash, they probably did succeed in con-
vincing most North Koreans that they were fighting a defen-
sive battle.

Colonel Kim also showed me a photograph of John Foster
Dulles, standing in a trench with U. S. officers and South
Korean soldiers and pointing to something out of the camera's
range. This, said Kim, was further proof. Dulles was pointing
north, telling the South Koreans where to attack, giving
instructions for the invasion.

I don't remember what I said to all this. I'm sure it wasn't
important, because to this day I don't know exactly why you

Colonel Kim and Friends 1 3 9

go about refuting absolute absurdities or lies so bald. Once the
lie or the absurdity has transcended the whole realm of reason-
ableness, there simply is no reasonable answer.

Kim also made a great point of dates. North Koreans, he
claimed, had done no fighting until June 26, although the
ROK troops had invaded North Korea on June 25. I didn't
know what I was talking about, he said, when I gave him the
date of June 25 for the start of the southern invasion. Well,
for a while I just listened to this, but finally he made me lose
my temper. I said, "Now listen, you can do a lot of things,
but to try to tell me, a military man, that a six-pronged inva-
sion, including amphibious operations, was nothing more than
a counterattack is just plain dumb. As far as the South Koreans
being ordered by us to start the war, the whole idea is absurd.
Nobody would conceivably order a war started when all the
top officers were out of the country. You may take me for a
damn fool, but I'm not that silly."

Nevertheless, he continued, then and later, to spend hours
trying to convince me the South Koreans had started the war.

Lieutenant Colonel Choi spent a long time on the 1948 or-
ganization of the yth Division. I don't know whether he
didn't realize that American general officers seldom stay in any
one division job two years, or whether the questions were
merely a warm-up. But the answers could not possibly have
made the slightest difference in the fall of 1950. He also
wanted me to tell him the names of the Republic of Korea
chiefs of staff (there had been three in about the same number
of weeks at the start of the war) , ROK division commanders,
and the location of ROK divisions at the time I was captured.
Some of this information I actually did not have; and about
the rest of it I developed a convenient lack of memory.

Then we moved to tack number two. Choi told me how

1 40 General Dean's Story

aggressive ROK division commanders were, how all of them
but one had a Japanese Army background. He proceeded to
name each division commander, each corps commander, and
the various chiefs of staff, telling me what they had done for
the Japanese, where they had served. He gave me a detailed
dossier on every man, including his relatives and what jobs
they held. The information was complete, even to the fact
that Lee Heung Koon, one of the South Korean generals
whom they apparently hated with especial fervor, had as a
young lieutenant taken a blood oath of fealty to the Japanese
emperor.

These were things far beyond any information I had ever
had about the South Korean generals. Why he wanted answers
from me when he had seemingly complete records in front
of him is a little hard to understand, but we spent hours on
this line of inquiry.

Then he shifted gears. What secret weapons did we have?
Were we going to use the atom bomb? What would be our
target? (Obviously they were scared to death that we might
use it.) How did our airplanes home on a target? How did
they find their way? What types of planes did we have in the
Far East? How many airfields in Japan? (He knew about a
good many I had not known were in operation again.) The
questions went on and on, and I almost wore out those vocal
cords which form the words, "I don't know." I was tempted
to manufacture a few secret weapons just for his benefit, but
resisted. The trouble with that sort of lying is that we might
actually have some of the things I dreamed up. In war things
happen very fast. So I said nothing, although I could have
created some dillies out of my imagination.

We stopped a few minutes for lunch, and then Lieutenant
Colonel Hong took over. He was a big, well-built Korean,

Colonel Kim and Friends 141

weighing perhaps a hundred and eighty pounds. Hong was a
labor specialist, and I learned from his questions that he had
been in Seoul, helping to organize strikes and sabotage, when
I was military governor. He boasted that he had never been
to second school (meaning high school) but was nevertheless
a well-read Marxist, knew the Communist Manifesto by heart,
and could quote the Geneva Convention (on the treatment of
prisoners in war and allied matters) by paragraph. When 1
protested that as a prisoner of war, under the Geneva Con-
vention, I could not be questioned except about my name,
rank, and serial number, he stated, quoting paragraph so-and-
so, that in special cases prisoners could be required to give
further information. I was a special case, he said, because I was
a war criminal, so he could question me about the 1947-48
acts that had made me one.

I was getting fairly well accustomed to this title of "war
criminal." Both Colonel Kim and General Pak had used it
earlier; and Pak had added that as military governor I had
been responsible for the deaths of "many patriots." I could
have said that most of those killed might have been patriots
to him but were also murderers and wreckers, but it hardly
seemed worth while at the time.

Hong's questioning started with the massacre of policemen
and their families at Taegu, a 1 946 event that had been one of
the low spots in our early occupation of Korea. About this he
wanted to know who was to blame, why some American
officers in the area were transferred all the details. I couldn't
be of much help to him. In 1 946 I had been in Leavenworth,
Kansas, and Korea still had been only a remote spot on the
map to me.

From that episode he went through virtually every event up
until the time the war started, with special emphasis on the

i4 2 General Dean's Story

wave of railroad sabotage that had disrupted our communica-
tions in February 1948, when I had * been governor. In each
case he obviously was trying to put the whole onus on the
military ,,and on American officials especially me. We went
over and over the guerrilla campaign on Cheju island, the
South Korean Army mutiny, and the railroad strikes that had
occurred while I was in Korea; we also went over and over
things that had occurred before I came or after I left. Why
had I sent troops and police to Cheju-do? Why had I impris-
oned railroad and streetcar strikers? Why had I arranged the
elections of 1948 in the manner I had?

During this session I permitted myself to argue occasion-
ally; on military matters 1 had said almost nothing. But Hong's
absurdities succeeded in making me angry among them, more
about the United States ordering the war started. Again I
stated, 'That's nonsense on the face of it. Even if we ever
planned to do anything that silly, we certainly wouldn't do it
when our troops were all over Japan on maneuvers. If we were
going to start a war deliberately, which we never do, at least
we'd be ready. We wouldn't have to scurry around after it
started in order to get ships to carry our army to the fighting."

At last we had twenty or thirty minutes for supper. I was
eating as well as the rest of them, but never had much time to
do it. I don't think they were deliberately attempting to make
me sick. It was just that they had no hospital facilities or de-
cent medical treatment, and very little food. Actually I think
they believed they should get me well, so that they could get
more out of me.

In the evening Major Kim took over, with the best-prepared
notes and the most searching questions of the three. He con-
centrated on questions concerning the economics of South
Koreawhy we had not built more industries, why we

Colonel Kim and Friends 143

brought in food for the Koreans rather than more instruments
of food production, why we hadn't constructed fertilizer
plants but were exploiting the country.

I said once, "That's just your opinion."

Fie immediately became wildly angry. "You're not cooper-
ating! You're toadying to rank. You're very nice when a
colonel talks to you, and not too bad when a lieutenant colonel
talks, but you won't cooperate with a mere major."

The techniques of the questioners had one thing in common.
A question frequently consisted of a statement, paragraphs
long, followed by three words: "What's your opinion?"

For example, Major Kim spent hours telling me about
unemployment in the United States, the defects of capitalism
and so-called free enterprise, the ills of our country.

Finally, tiring of this, I said, "Have you ever been to the
United States?"

He said he had not.

I said, "And you're trying to tell me about things I was
born and raised with! I know more about the political struc-
ture of the United States than you do, and more about condi-
tions than you do. You're young. When you grow up, maybe
you'll learn something, but I'm old enough to be your father.
Talk about being ignorant! You're the ignorant one." I didn't
tell him, "I can sing louder than you," but I suppose I might
as well have done so.

He jumped up. "I'll have you know," he said, "that I have
my doctor's degree, and I got it by writing on the political
and economic situation of the United States. I was a professor
of economics at Kim II Sung University, but the Inmun Gun
thought so highly of my ability that they made me a major
when the war started."

Perhaps I would have been more impressed if my hands

144 General Dean's Story

hadn't hurt so much from sitting on them, and if I hadn't

needed to go to the toilet just then. I went.

Major Kim kept it up for his full four hours, and he had
information that made some of the questions hard to answer.
He had an annual report from the Chosen National Bank and
referred to it frequently. He would say, "Here in 1938 there
were so many chung-bo (equivalent to a hectare, or two and
a half acres) under cultivation, but in 1948, when you were
military governor, there were so many less. Why was that?
Here you talk about feeding the people, but you have less
land under cultivation and more people unemployed. You
come over here, you bring the people food, but you make
paupers out of the population. You didn't give them work,
didn't establish any industry, or give them the means of pro-
duction. The reason was, you wanted to import your own
matches, your own cigarette lighters, your own pencils. Here
in North Korea we make those things for ourselves. What is
your opinion?"

He was a smart boy and he had enough facts to make a
fairly good case especially when I was sitting there with
nothing to refer to, no figures to compete with his.

But finally he too wilted, and Lieutenant Colonel Choi came
back, fresh as a daisy, with more questions about military mat-
ters. The interpreters had a rougher time than the interroga-
tors, because there were only the two of them; they had to
work shift and shift.

As I relate this, I can't be sure just which questions were
asked in which session, or the exact division among the three
questioners; but I do remember that Choi emphasized ques-
tions about the air war a great deal. Why did we have fields
on Okinawa? What was our objective? Obviously he thought
I was the most stupid general officer he'd ever encountered.

Colonel Kim and Friends 145

Finally I said, "Well, you were lucky. So far as division
commanders are concerned, you were fighting the second
team when the war started. But we'll have the first string in
presently perhaps we do now, for all I know and then it'll
be a different story. You have to remember that all American
generals are not as dumb as I am. You just happened to catch
the dumbest."

I got Hong's attentions again in the middle of the night,
then the special ministrations of Colonel Kim, who interrupted
the questioning for an hour to reprimand me for failing to
answer questions. I still was not cooperating. While he talked
my teeth were chattering, and this seemed to annoy him. I
also was shivering.

The colonel said, "What are you shivering for, making
your teeth go that way for? Are you cold?"

I said, "Yes, I'm a little chilly."

"This isn't cold," he said. "This isn't cold at all. Take off
your coat. Take off your shirt. Take off your trousers and
your undershirt. I'll show you what it means to be cold."

I ended up in my shorts. The temperature was still thirty-
three degrees.

Then Choi went back to work. After an hour, during which
Colonel Kim departed, Choi also was annoyed by my teeth
chattering, because he said, "You may put on your under-
shirt." I could see the pattern now. Choi was to be the kind
person, my only friend during this endurance contest, while
Colonel Kim (who had already shouted too much to pretend
to be kind now) would play the part of the rneanie. It's an old
police interrogation technique that has whip-sawed many a
criminal into a confession.

The undershirt felt wonderful, even though it was only a
cotton T-shirt, and I was allowed to keep it on until Colonel

146 General Dean's Story

Kim returned an hour or so later. Then I went back to shorts
only once more. I didn't get the T-shirt again during the entire
questioning.

There were breaks for meals when I got nothing to eat
except soft and watery chook, which left my mouth filled
with white flakes, like alkali but the Choi-Hong-Kim, Kim-
Choi-Hong-Kim succession never stopped for sixty-eight
hours. The only other breaks I got were when Fd yell
"Benjo," and run for the latrine outside the church. A guard
always went with me, to see that I didn't loiter; and usually
they lived right up to their orders. One enlisted man was a
little kinder than the others, and when he was along I could
steal a few seconds outside to stop and pick up chestnuts that
had fallen from the trees. I ate them on the spot while he
conveniently looked the other way, or hid them behind the
cushions of the overstuffed chair in my room.

Then Colonel Kim called a halt, after using the last hour
himself to give me information. This consisted of his opinion
that I would not cooperate, that I was a dog and a robber,
"and," he said, "I'm going to treat you like a dog." He ordered
the guards to take away the medicine, which had seemed to be
doing me a little good, and to move my cot out into the
guards' big room, where it was left in the middle of the
floor.

Colonel Kim said, "No more washing. You can't wash, you
dog! You can have one blanket and sleep over there in a
corner on the floor. We're going to let you have some rest,
but you'd better think it over and realize that you must co-
operate. You want to remember that it's getting colder. If
you fail to cooperate, we not only won't give you any clothes,
we'll keep you outdoors."

I'm not sure whether this was the time that he threatened

Colonel Kim and Friends 147

to have my tongue cut out, but he did at one time. I said,
"Go ahead and cut it out. Then you won't be able to make
me talk." After that I heard nothing more of that particular
threat.

I had no trouble getting to sleep on the smooth boards of
the floor. During the sixty-eight hours I had been allowed no
sleep, and the guard would yell at me or kick me with his bare
foot if I dozed in the straight chair. But I had been asleep only
a few minutes when somebody tapped me with his foot until
I awoke again. The awakening was for breakfast, which con-
sisted of more sticky rice and an apple. I slept most of that
day and that night, rolling off the bare floor onto the rug when
the guard wasn't watching too closely.

The next morning at eight, here came the boys again. Hong
was the lead-off man, and Exhibit A was an alleged captured
Sonth Korean government report of the suppression measures
taken against guerrillas and Communists in 1949, including the
burning of forty thousand homes, the slaying of large numbers
of guerrillas and sympathizers, and the loss of many police
officers and soldiers. Also, he had a large photograph of one
guerrilla's head, impaled on a pole. What, he wanted to know,
was my conclusion about that?

I didn't have any. I had been in Japan that year.

Then we shifted back a year, to Cheju-do and photographs
taken of me with anti-guerrilla leaders there. Guerrillas had
constantly hampered our occupation government and the
new South Korean government on this island off the south-
west tip of the peninsula, and the isolation of the place made
control quite difficult. When I was governor I sent both
constabulary troops and police detachments there to try to
restore order; but for a time it seemed to me that they were
fighting each other rather than the bandits in the hills. On an

148 General Dean's Story

inspection trip, Colonel Rothwell Brown discovered evidence
that civilian women had been killed without trial, and I sent a
summary court-martial officer down. He tried several police-
men, who were given prison terms of twenty-five years each.
At another time I went to the island myself, taking the
leaders of Korean constabulary, police, and civil administra-
tions just to make sure they did issue orders which would
stop the bloody confusion. Even with this effort the election
of 1948 was badly botched (the only place in Korea where
frauds were completely obvious) and ballot boxes were stolen
and would-be voters intimidated. As a result, I was forced to
declare the election void on the island, and to order it held

again.

After the South Koreans took over their own government
trouble continued on the island. In October 1948 the i4th
ROK Regiment was ordered to embark from Yosu; instead,
mutineers killed many of their own loyal officers and started
to take over that part of South Korea, at the extreme southern
tip of the peninsula. Immediately other ROK forces, led by
Brigadier General Song Ho, were sent to quell the mutiny.
There was a bitter battle; and after the loyal ROK had won it,
several of the mutiny leaders were executed summarily.
Others escaped into the mountains and headed up guerrilla
units, which continued to harass the South Korean govern-
ment up to the war, then started cooperating with the Com-
munists from the north.

Hong and Choi, at Sunan, went over and over these events,
trying to prove that I had ordered executions and had been
responsible for the entire mess. I got tired of all this conversa-
tion and said, "Well, you're wasting your time trying to get
me to admit responsibility for things that happened when I
was military governor. It's your language, not mine; and you

Colonel Kim and Friends 149

have all the names and the figures. I can't possibly put np a
factual defense, having nothing to work with, so go ahead and
shoot me. I never sanctioned the killing of any soldier or
civilian without trial; but if any were killed without trial, in
the final analysis it was my responsibility. Anything that
occurred while I was military governor I was responsible for.
Why don't you just shoot me? Don't wait and go through the
farce of a trial."

This wasn't exactly bravery, in the ordinary sense, because
I was quite certain that nothing I said or failed to say would
make any difference I was sure they were going to shoot me
anyhow.

Once more they shifted the emphasis, to the national elec-
tions of 1948. The top exhibit was a series of photographs of
police officers lining up men and women, presumably to force
them to vote. The photos probably were from one of the
isolated border towns from which we had received reports of
this sort at the time.

But so far as I was concerned that had been the only free,
secret-ballot election in Korea in four thousand years, and I
was proud of the way it had been handled. I had organized
local committees, made speeches telling the people of the
importance of voting, held endless conferences. For the elec-
tion period itself, I had stopped all military government work
and sent out more than a thousand people to visit all the
different voting areas, making sure that just such incidents as
these did not occur, that no one was forced to vote. We did
not have the personnel to keep someone at each polling place
all the rime it was open, but we covered all the major spots
and at least visited practically every other spot.

During the preparations and the election itself some eighty-
two policemen and sixty election officials had been killed, and

150 General Dean's Story

there had been fires in polling places and other property dam-
agebut on the whole it had been a free election, held by a
people who did not know anything about elections. The kill-
ings and the burnings, I felt, had almost all been done either
by Communists or at the instigation of Communists \vho were
ready to do anything to prevent the new government from
being organized just as later they were willing to start a war
to prevent it from functioning.

In the questioning, these boys at Sunan weren't interested
in any facts other than that I had been responsible for holding
an election, therefore for all the official deaths. I remember
Choi saying, "Why do you think these officials were killed?
Because the people wanted to vote? No, it was because they
were being forced to vote."

I began to have some idea, in these hours, what the term
"war criminal" can mean which is anything the people apply-
ing it wish it to mean. And I could talk all day about the
fact that eighty per cent of the people registered and ninety
per cent of the registered voters cast a ballot, or about any
other figures I wished without making the slightest impres-
sion.

Oddly enough, in the middle of a session in which I was
being called a robber and a running dog of Wall Street, one
of my interrogators Hong, I think paid me a sudden compli-
ment.

"One thing we have to admit about you, though," he said,
"and that is that you never violated Korean womanhood.
You're a thief and a murderer, but you never had a con-
cubine." Apparently their excellent prewar intelligence system
in Seoul had interested itself in all sorts of details.

It was also Hong who informed me that it was only a matter
of time before the United States would be Communist, and he

Colonel Kim and Friends 1 5 1

read off a list of the principal offices of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation and their territories.

This sort of thing might ordinarily be dismissed as common
knowledge, but it did frighten me a little. Several times I had
been warned that I should be thinking about my family, who
might not be as safe as I imagined in Berkeley, California.
Both General Pak and Colonel Kim had warned me that if I
didn't start cooperating, something unpleasant would cer-
tainly happen to Mildred or to my children.

As the second interrogation continued I began to notice a
few amusing things. One was a sure way to make the inter-
viewerany of them hit the ceiling. So many of these ques-
tions actually were long statements, harangues, and the only
real query was at the end: "What is your conclusion?"

I'd just say, "I have no conclusion," and the interrogator
would blow his top. He'd worked a long time over that com-
plicated statement, and he hated to waste it for just one measly
little four-word answer.

The questioning did not go on steadily. There were periods
of an hour or two when the interrogators were out of the
room, but they didn't do me much good. My hands were
swollen to ham size, my hip bones were like two boils, and
sitting down at all was continuous misery; but I still had to
sit there as if being questioned. If I nodded the guard would
shout or kick me with his bare feet. And in these silence
periods I always had trouble in getting the guard to allow me
to go to the toilet. I'd say "Benjo," but frequently he would
shake his head in a negative. I couldn't have that, so I'd just
go out anyhow. That left him no choice but to come with me
or shoot me, and I guess he'd have been in the soup if he shot
me.

In that church at Sunan I became so acclimated to continu-

1 5 2 General Dean's Story

ous cold that I grew a whole new set of ideas about comfort.
And ever since I've been home I want the windows wide open
when other people are shivering. I freeze out all my friends
if Fm not careful.

Sometime during the second interrogation Colonel Kim
came back to take an active hand. He said, "You say you have
no knowledge of America's intentions in the Far East, you
have no knowledge of the plan of maneuver, you have no
knowledge of secret weapons. But you do have knowledge of
the defense plans for Japan. You could not possibly have held
the positions you've had in your Army if you didn't know
these defense plans."

He worked on that for two or three hours, yelling, storm-
ing, and asking the same questions over and over. While he
was at it I just sat there. Once he screamed, "You're sleeping
with your eyes open!"

That was a good one. The interpreter had trouble with it,
but I got a small chuckle anyhow. I wished I were doing just
that.

After Kim got all through that time, he said that he was
getting tired and if I didn't start cooperating soon, they'd take
measures to see that I did. Up to now, he added, they had not
done anything to me that our own intelligence officers didn't
do. He was just using our own CIC methods.

The other three interrogators were tired too, so they let me
go back to sleep on the floor without my blanket. I was
keeping track, just for my own satisfaction, and they had not
done so well: it had taken only forty-four hours to wear out
the three of them, plus Colonel Kim. This was about four a.m.
I slept on the floor most of the day and was looking forward
to another night's rest. I felt I wasn't in too much trouble yet.
Fd had experience in staying awake before. During a New

Colonel Kim and Friends 1 5 3

Year's Eve attack in Europe, in 1944, I worked four days
without sleep, and I knew I could do that well again; I
thought, "Well, if they get over five or six days, I'll probably
just go to sleep in spite of them."

This Communist army life was not all gravy for the enlisted
men. Whenever they were awake but not actually on guard,
they spent their time doing their Communist doctrine home-
work or holding classes. Sometimes even the duty guard would
be working on his papers, copying something while he kept
one eye on me. They copied by the hour, and most of them
got paper for the work by stealing it calmly from the desk in
the interpreters' little room behind my own. They also lifted
any cigarettes anyone had been careless enough to leave on a
desk or in a drawer. For entertainment they practiced throw-
ing rope bonds on each other, getting so they could tie a
prisoner's hands tight enough to cut off the circulation in a
few seconds.

I did not get that night's rest. About nine p.m. I was awak-
ened. Nobody said we were going to dance again, but I got
the general idea. Major Kim came on stage, then Hong, then
Choi, but they all showed signs of running out of questions.
I would be left alone with a guard for hours, still having to
sit in that uncomfortable chair and being kept awake, but at
least not having to listen to any more of those fancy argu-
ments. Whenever they'd think up a new question or one more
way to ask an old one over again, one of them would come in
and work on me for a while.

Now and then they'd vary the procedure by giving me an-
other lecture about the American War between the States,
reminding me how much the United States had resented Brit-
ish aid to the Confederate States, and what a furor there had
been over a British threat to interfere.

154 General Dean's Story

"This," they said, "is our civil war, not yours. We're not
attacking America, we're not bombing America, we have no
designs on America, and yet you come over here and interfere
in our civil war. You're fighting in our house." That was a
constant refrain.

In this manner we passed the night, the next day, and most
of the next night thirty-two hours. About the second mid-
night Colonel Kim took over once more, for what w T as to be
the last interrogation. He was in a standing-up, table-pounding
mood, and got himself so worked up that phlegm flew out of
his mouth. Tal, whom I liked because he just translated in a
monotone, like a machine, never mirroring the shoutings and
rantings of the interrogator, w r as the interpreter.

Colonel Kim was talking about the murder of innocents by
our aircraft when I broke in, "I've seen atrocities committed
by your troops worse than anything you've mentioned. I've
seen our men captured, then murdered in cold blood while
they had their hands tied behind them, at Chochiwon. And I
talked to a lieutenant who saw your men drive prisoners ahead
of them, to try to get others to surrender then shoot them
when we opened fire to repel an attack."

This so infuriated Colonel Kim that he yelled, "Close your
eyes! I'm going to spit in your face."

I should have said, "Spit, you creep, and I'll knock you on

your ." But I just wasn't up to it physically. I said, "Close

my eyes? Go on and spit! You've been spitting in my eyes for
the last half -hour."

I don't know how the interpreter told him that, but it must
have been accurate. I thought Kim was going to have
apoplexy.

He said, "All right, this is the end. We're going to torture
you."

CHAPTER VIII

Gun That 'Wouian^i Fire

Colonel Kim leaned back. "Do you know," he asked, "how
we torture people?"

I said, "No."

He described a process in which water is forced into either
the mouth or the rectum, under pressure. The latter, he said,
"forces everything in you, everything, to come out through
your mouth. It's very sickening."

I said, "That sounds good to me. The shape I'm in, you
won't have to use much pressure. I think that'll kill me
quickly. That sounds all right."

He had been fuming, but now he spluttered. "Sometimes,"
he said, "we drive bamboo splinters up under the fingernails
and then set fire to them."

The setting fire didn't sound too bad to me, but that busi-
ness of driving the splinters hurt just thinking about it. I
laughed at him, but perhaps the laughter was a little forced.
I was fearful he might be telling the truth.

"Also," he said, "we have electrical treatments. The build-
ing where we use these, our laboratory, is just a mile from
here, and in the morning we'll take you there."

It was almost morning.

He said, "You know that you're dead? Your own people
think you're dead, so we can do anything to you that we

156 General Dean's Story

want to do. Under torture you'll probably die, but not be-
fore you've given us the information we want. We will get
that. You probably won't live but your death won't be too
fast for you to give me the information I want in detail. I've
never failed yet. Do you want to write a last message?"

I said, "No."

He said, "Then you must sign a statement that you do not
want to write a last message."

It was another one of those foolish things. I said, "Okay,
I'll write a last message. I'll write a last letter to my family."

He gave me paper and a pencil, and I wrote:

Dear Mildred, June, and Bill, I was physically captured on 25
August and have been a prisoner of war ever since. I did not sur-
render but was physically overpowered. Before I was captured I
wandered in the hills for thirty-five days, without food. As a result
I am terribly ill and do not think that I will live much longer.
Therefore this is my last letter. June, do not delay in making your
mother a grandmother. Bill, remember that integrity is the most
important thing of all. Let that always be your aim. Mildred, re-
member that for twenty-four years you have made me very, very
happy.

That was all.

When it was translated for him Colonel Kim said, "What?
Why do you say that you are so ill? That you're going to
die? Why don't you tell them we're going to kill you?"

I was a little out of patience. I swear too much, but per-
haps this time it was justified. I said, "Why, you dumb bas-
tard! I know you'd never send out any letter which said that.
If I'm going to write a letter to my family I want them to get
it. I didn't write that for your benefit. I wrote that so my
family would know I was dead, and what I was thinking

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 5 7

about. You're so damn dumb! Now you can kill me and It'll
never be held against you. You've got everything you want.
I've stated that if I die it's by natural causes."

He just looked at me. He looked at me as if I were the
most stupid individual he'd ever seen in his life. He said, "All
right. In the morning we'll go to the laboratory," and he
stomped out.

Remarkably, a guard had brought back my blanket. I
rolled up in it, in the corner on the floor, and after a little
while scooted over on the rug, where it was a tiny bit
warmer.

One guard always walked a post outside this church build-
ing and another always was in my room, each of them armed
with a sub-machine gun. But they had one extra gun, one of
those regular sub-machine guns with a circular ammunition
drum. Through cracks in the partition between my room and
the guard's room I had noticed that this extra gun always sat
in a corner between the wall of the building and the partition,
on the side opposite me. The only furniture in that guards'
room was my cot, which had been left there when Colonel
Kim ordered it taken away from me. The guards all slept on
the floor. In my room several straight chairs still remained,
the table, and also the two big overstuffed chairs, although
I never had a chance to use them. When no officer was pres-
ent, a room guard frequently flopped down in one of them.
Sometimes he dozed.

This morning while I was lying on the floor I thought,
"Well, this is the day. If they take me up to that torture
building, I'm so weak that I might say something, I might
tell them something before I die. I've got to get that gun."

This was not a new idea. Previously I'd made vague plans
that when I was strong enough I would try to get it, some-

1 5 8 General Dean's Story

how, for an escape attempt. But at this time I couldn't have
made a hundred yards even if nobody interfered with me.
I thought, "Well, that's out now, but I've still got to get the
gun. I've got to knock myself off, and fast, before they tor-
ture me." The trouble was, you see, I did know the defense
plans for Japan.

The guard in my room slumped down in the chair and
obligingly went to sleep almost immediately. That left the
twenty guards in the other room. If they all went to breakfast
in the cook-shack next door and the guard on duty still didn't
waken, the time would be ripe.

About five-thirty a.m. they all trooped out. Colonel Kim,
Choi, Major Kim, and Hong all slept in the cook-shack or
so I thought. The interpreters were in their own room, with
the door shut. When the guards left I slid quietly out of my
blanket and started crawling.

At Taejon months before I had examined one of those guns
with the drum magazine. Clarke had taken a captured sample
apart and together we had succeeded in reassembling it. I felt
I was quite good with that double-triggered rig. I thought,
"When I get it, I'll fire one short burst out of the window in
the general direction of the cook-shack. If old Colonel Kim's
on the ball hell come fogging out of there to see what it's
all about. The second burst will get him. Then I'll stick the
muzzle in my mouth and finish the jobbut I'll have Kim's
company when I go. I wouldn't want to miss that."

As I crawled to the door between the two rooms I glanced
up at the sleeping man in the chair. I could get only a partial
look at him. But I was startled. The man sleeping there
looked like Hong. I thought briefly, "Is he doing some of the
guarding now?" but didn't take time to make sure. I went on
around the partition and reached the corner, passing close to

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 5 9

the cot on the way but not being able to see on top of it from
my crawling position.

I got the gun in my hands and came up to a kneeling posi-
tion. I tried to pull the bolt back, but it jammed. I kept work-
ing at it, but must have made some noise.

There was a bellow behind me. From the cot not the chair
the one-hundred-and-eighty-pound Colonel Hong swung
down and rushed me. Instead of sleeping on the floor of the
cook-shack where he belonged, like any good member of the
proletariat, this big capitalist-thinking character had grabbed
an opportunity to sleep on a soft mattress.

I swung the gun. There was no time for Colonel Kim now,
but I could still get Hong or could have, if I had solved that
jammed bolt. Hong was a brave man. He charged right into
the barrel of that gun and the damned thing still wouldn't
fire.

Hong hit me from the front, my room guard from one
side. Then there were Koreans all over me, although I don't
know where in the world they all came from. In seconds it
was finished. I couldn't move my arms or legs, and then I
was being inarched back into my own room. Nobody beat
me, however, or did anything else after they had overpow-
ered me. I was seated in the straight chair, and was still sitting
there when Lee, the interpreter, came in, his face blanched.
The first thing he said was, "Why, General, you would have
killed me!"

I said, "No, Lee, I didn't want to kill you. I wanted to get
that son-of-a-gun Kim, and myself. They said they were
going to torture me this morning, and I didn't intend to be
tortured."

Lee hadn't been there when Colonel Kim was ranting, so
I don't know how he was so sure, but he said, "Oh, they

160 General Dean's Story

didn't say that. They will never torture you. General, you
must never take your own life. There's always hope. But Fm
very much afraid you would have killed me, General." He
went away, shaking his head.

I never saw Colonel Kim again. I can only speculate about
whether he was somehow disgraced by my suicide attempt
(that would have been too bad) ; whether he simply gave me
up as hopeless; or w r hether, somehow, he was bluffed. I do
hope he didn't drop dead. He and 1 have a few things I still
want to discuss, and Fd hate to think that there won't be
another chance.

They left me sitting in the chair, for once without break-
fast, until midmorning, when Lieutenant Colonel Choi came
in. Guards took the drawstring out of my shorts the only
clothing I had and removed from the room everything else
with which I might conceivably have harmed myself string,
my knife and fork, everything. Thereafter I ate with a spoon,
which was removed immediately after I laid it down.

Choi said, "I want you to know that there is an increased
guard, both here and in the village. You're to be tried for
armed insurrection. How did you happen to do this? You
were trying to escape, weren't you?"

I said, "In my condition I don't think I could have. I
wanted to kill Colonel Kim, and then I was going to kill
myself."

He said, "No, you were trying to escape. That's armed
insurrection."

He called in a guard and it was the one boy who had been
kind to me, the one who had allowed me to pick up and hide
chestnuts. Choi said, "Was this man asleep when you went
out?"

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 6 1

I said, "No. Colonel Hong was asleep in that chair when
I went out." I still thought this, at the time.

He said, "No. Colonel Hong was on the bed in the other
room. He's the man who took the gun away from you. This
is the man who was on guard and went to sleep."

If I hadn't said already that Hong had been asleep in the
chair, there might have been a chance to cover up for the
kindly guard, but now the fat was in the fire and there was
nothing I could do. I said, "I don't know anything about that.
I just crawled out there and got the gun. I don't know who
was on guard or who was sleeping. But whoever the man on
the bed was, he should be commended. You tell your chief
that he's a brave man, because if I could have made that gun
work he wouldn't be talking now."

The poor little guard was led out. I can only presume that
he, my friend, was shot for being asleep.

That afternoon a lieutenant showed up to take direct
charge of the guard, which had been run by sergeants before.
In the evening Choi came in once more, and his attitude had
changed. "Colonel Kim has gone," he told me, "and I'm going
to have charge of you. You're a sick man and we're going to
make you a patient. Before we do anything else, we must
make you well."

I got chook for dinner again, but other things went back
to the pre-interrogation system. My cot, sheets, and blanket
were brought back into the room, and I was allowed to sleep
or get up as I chose. My clothes also were brought back. The
next morning another doctor came to see me and gave my
chest another resounding thumping. The only explanation I
can give for this standard procedure by all Korean doctors
is that they see so much tuberculosis, they just automatically

1 62 General Dean's Story

assume any patient must have it. He left some more medicine

for me, and I went back to bed again.

Choi was a changed man from then on, kindly and friendly.
But on October i he said, "As a personal favor, will you
write a letter for me? I'm leaving tomorrow night, and I'm
supposed to get some information from you. Will you write
what you think you could improve if you were to be mili-
tary governor of South Korea again? What do you think
you did well? Also, your personal opinion of Syngman Rhee.
This will be a personal favor to me so my superiors will think
I've accomplished something; and if you do it, I assure you
that you'll go to a prisoner-of-war camp right away." This
had been my reiterated request.

It never was a matter of more than technical Interest in
North Korea, but the Geneva Convention sets up definite
rules for the treatment of all prisoners adequate food, cloth-
ing, and reasonable care. A prisoner may be questioned le-
gally only about his name, rank, and serial number. Officers,
says the Convention, "shall be treated with due regard for
their rank and age." Where possible, orderlies shall be pro-
vided for officers who normally would have them in their
own armies. The holding power is required to provide ad-
vances against military pay in the case of general officers,
classification number five, the local equivalent of seventy-
five Swiss francs approximately eighteen dollars per month.
Nothing is said specifically, however, about the size of camps
in which they shall be held. On this one point, about which
I made the most complaint, the Koreans technically were
within their rights. So long as I had a prison-camp address,
and the camp was In a place providing reasonable safety for
me, the Convention did not require them to house me with
other prisoners. Needless to say, however, I never saw any-

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 6 3

thing like the required pay or orderly service, and whether
my treatment corresponded to my age and rank can be
judged from the details of it.

On October 2 I wrote two notes for Choi. In the first I
said that I was proud of our record in agriculture, the
rehabilitation of cotton and silk mills, the production of pa-
per, the building up of railroad and shipping lines.

I did not write then, but might add now, that I would do
a couple of other things. The first would be to emphasize to
our own people the terrific harm done by thoughtlessness.
Through all the questioning and my many subsequent con-
versations with intelligent Koreans who had chosen commu-
nism after knowing something about our government in
South Korea, ran one refrain: they resented being called
"gooks," and the slighting references to their race and color
more than any of our policies, ill advised or not. Again and
again I was told that this man or that one had come north
because he had decided he never could get along with peo-
ple who called him a "gook," or worse, among themselves;
because he resented American attentions to Korean women;
or because he hated to see foreigners riding in his country in
big automobiles while he and his family had to walk.

When I was governor a Korean newspaper, in a friendly
news story, once called me "the general who walks," because
of my habit of walking to the office for exercise, not politi-
cal effect nosing around the streets of Seoul, and hunting for
pheasant in the hills south of Yongdong-po. At the time I
thought the title was amusing; but before I left Korea in 1953
I realized that walking had been one of the best things I did
in that job and much more effective than some of my care-
fully planned activities. If I were governor again I would
certainly walk more and so would a lot of other people in

164 General Dean's Story

the American part of the government. And use of the term
"gook," or its many equivalents, by Americans, would be
an offense for military punishment.

On this day, however, I wrote no more about what I would
change. To satisfy Choi's request about President Rhee I
wrote: "I feel that he is a devoted patriot and lover of his
country. He is a man who has devoted his whole life to a
free and united Korea; and everything he does, he feels is
in the best interests of his country."

These notes satisfied Choi, who departed the same day.

So did !, about ten p.m., in a great hurry. I got to take my
two blankets, but the guards were in such a great hurry that
they wouldn't even let me rescue my extra pair of shorts or
a spare handkerchief, which were hanging on a clothesline
outside the building to dry after being laundered.

Our vehicle was a small truck. Besides the passengers it
carried a couple of iron safes, which had nothing to do with
me except as nuisance value, for they constantly banged
against my knees. Tal went along, a lieutenant, the driver,
and three guards U Eun Chur, Pack Chun Bong, and De
Soon Yur. (These spellings, and many other transliterations
of Korean words in this book, are phonetic, subject to vary-
ing interpretations.)

As we prepared to pull out, Lee said, "Good-by, General.
Don't give up hope or try to kill yourself. You must live, and
everything will be fine again, and you will see your family
once more."

Of the two interpreters I liked Lee the less, but I think I
may have done him an injustice. He shouted at me when the
interrogators shouted, ranted when they ranted, but this may
have been only to impress the Korean officers. Lee went to
Pyongyang on October 10 this I learned much laterand

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 6 5

surrendered to American troops when they took the city nine
days later. Under interrogation he told a straight story of his
experiences with me and gave American officials the first de-
tailed word that I still was alive. I believe now that he was
trying to help me all the time, even when he urged me to
manufacture stories to tell the interrogators during those long
questioning sessions. I'm rather ashamed that I doubted him.

I said good-by to him in front of the church that night. I
should also have patted each of those chairs and given a really
fond farewell to the mattress and cot. These were the last
pieces of Western furniture I was to see for a long time.

We moved north in the truck, along with convoy after
convoy of other trucks, all running at night and in a hurry.
Traffic jams were common, and some of them, particularly
near Sukchon, monumental. Nothing had been said to me
about any change in the military situation, but anyone could
tell that something had happened. This was a retreating army,
getting out fast. I noticed the especially heavy traffic coming
from the coastal areas, and now know they were pulling out
in fear of another amphibious attack, such as the one made
at Inchon.

It's not far to Huichon, about a hundred miles, but we were
thirteen hours getting there. And on that cold night I was
struck by the actual tenderness of the three guards, espe-
cially U Eun Chur, the senior sergeant, in trying to keep me
warm by holding a blanket over my shoulders.

That trip was the first of many so similar that it is difficult
to remember them individually; and U's kindness was almost
my first experience with the many-sided, kind and cruel,
inventive, clever, stupid, resilient, unpredictable Korean char-
acter. The Koreans I speak of are not the politicians or mili-
tary commanders, but the farm hands and soldiers, cooks and

1 66 General Dean's Story

prison guards, fine chess players and terrible watch-repair-
men, the people who make communism possible. A good
many things happened to me in the next months and years,
but nothing more important than my opportunity to know
these people as I never could have done in a lifetime as an
uncaptured general. It may almost have been worth the three
years.

The outstanding single characteristic of most Korean coun-
try-town hotels and ordinary Korean homes is that they have
no furniture. I mean that literally. The Japanese run to pint-
sized tables and low-slung lacquered cabinets, and the Chinese
love screens and carved chests. The Korean does without any
furniture whatever.

In Huichon that next day I slept in a Korean hotel, on the
floor; and for most of a thousand nights thereafter I con-
tinued to sleep on floors sometimes on concrete or clay with
flues imbedded in it, and hot to the touch; occasionally on
matting over wood, the typical Japanese-style floor; much
of the time on hard-packed dirt.

The typical house of North Korea is a two-room structure
with a kitchen. One room, about four by eight feet, is built
below ground level, and one whole side of it is taken up by
a sort of covered fireplace, open on the room side but topped
with a flat clay or concrete cover, broken by three holes for
cooking pots. Flues from the fireplace lead under the raised
floors of the other two rooms, each about eight feet square,
before the smoke escapes through a chimney. The kitchen is
equipped with rice bowls and a stone water jar, in addition
to the three cooking pots one for rice, one for soup, and the
third for water. One room may contain a closet, but nothing
else. The walls are mud, reinforced with com stalks; the roof
is carefully thatched, the inside sometimes covered with paper

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 67

and in between live the big Norway rats, happy in their
burrowing place except when rains run down their tunnels
and soften the paper underneath. Then the rats often fall
through into the human living quarters, to the mutual upset
of both parties. There may be a window or two, but rarely
any glass.

In such houses, which varied only in minor details, I lived
three years. More important, in such houses the people of
North Korea live all the time. On those floors they sleep, eat,
work endlessly, and pore, hour after hour, over the texts of
communism: the works of Stalin and Engels and the devil's
mixture of fact and fancy, half-truth and outright lies, that
spreads the infection. That concoction is beautifully prepared
for just such people, with thousands of years of hunger and
back-breaking toil in their backgrounds, cold and sickness
and death as constant companions, and not the slightest con-
ception of ease or comfort such as we know.

One of the guards who left Sunan with me was De Soon
Yur, and he was with me until a few weeks before I was
repatriated. I came to know him well. If I were to try to
change the mind of this convinced Communist and could bring
him to the United States to accomplish it, I'm not sure that
I'd bother to show him government buildings or legislatures
at work, or even courts in which the accused has a chance for
justice. Rather, I'd take De Soon Yur first of all to an Amer-
ican supermarket and walk with him past a hundred-foot
meat counter. Pd like him to see in one minute more meat
kogi, in his language than he has seen in his entire life. I'd
like to take him to a Petaluma, California, poultry processing
plant (the squawking and bloodiness wouldn't bother him at
all), where he could watch a trainload of chickens come in,
then go out to market. Fd like him to see the milking ma-

1 68 General Dean's Story

chines in a modern dairy, Kansas wheat elevators and an Iowa

cornfield, a big knitting mill and a thousand sheep in a

band.

I'm not sure that the processes of democracy would impress
him or even interest him especially, for De Soon Yur is a
practical man. If I could show him the products of democ-
racythis man whose father and grandfather were hungry,
and who knits beautifully because he must, in order to have
a new pair of socks or gloves I think I might unmake a
Communist very fast.

What I am trying to say is that a glowing ideal is hard to
sell to a hungry man eight thousand miles away. What we
need for Korea is something to compare favorably to the
Communist promises of a hectare of land without excessive
rent, rice without too much millet in it, or a pencil produced
in a factory right in his home town.

However, I was not thinking of these things that day in
Huichon, or that night, when we walked a few blocks to a
Korean-Japanese house that is, one that had both a room
heated by an onder (under-floor flues) and one with no heat
in it but tatami mats on the floor. This room could have been
heated by a charcoal-burning habachi or a stove, but I saw
very few of either of these conveniences in North Korea.

The night before, Tal again had assured me that we were
going to a POW camp; now I asked about it once more, but
was told, "I have been instructed to get you well and to re-
store your health. Then you will go to a POW camp. But
first I must do everything in my power to get you well."

All this time I was unhappy at being kept away from a
regular camp; but after I came home and read about the
things that happened at those camps, I realized that I should
have thanked my lucky stars that I was not in one of them.

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 69

I never lived as badly as the men In them lived most of the
time.

I still had my two blankets and carried them from the hotel
to the house myself, as my only luggage. My guards had only
one blanket each but always slept in their clothing, which
consisted of long cotton underwear, two or three pairs of
trousers, and an equal number of shirts and sweaters. I was
amazed by the layers of home-knit clothing they wore under
their uniforms, which consisted only of trousers and a coat,
with green tabs on their shoulders to show that they \vere
members of the Security Forces, and a big T to show the rank
of master sergeant which virtually all of these and later
guards were. Shirts were various, and so were shoes. The
whole outfit could be called a uniform only by courtesy.

Tal seemed to be in charge of the group, although a lieu-
tenant also was present; and while we were at Huichon he
bought food with a lavish hand chicken, hog liver, beef
heart, eggs, and greens, in addition to the Inevitable rice. We
had no beverage (nor do most North Koreans) except suhn-
nuhn, which is water boiled in the rice cooking pot after the
rice has been removed but before the pot has been scraped.
This is full of browned rice fragments and has a pleasant fla-
vor. A bowl of this, taken with great slurpings of enjoyment,
is the typical ending for a good Korean meal. If you ask for
another bowl, you're looked at as if you were a pig.

I was too ill to enjoy much of the food, and disappointed
the woman cooking for us when she prepared what was an
obvious treat sweet potatoes. In Korea it's always whole hog
or none, so for that meal we had nothing but sweet potatoes.
Each serving was six big ones. I had difficulty in eating two
of the smaller ones, but I noticed that each guard ate his full
six.

1 70 General Dean's Story

We stayed in Huichon ten days, and I about decided that
this life as a prisoner was not too bad. The interpreter let me
sit on a snnporch, in a spot where 1 could get the direct rays
of the sun, which was warm in midday, even though this was
October and the nights were becoming more and more chill.
I'm a sun devotee, and this was real luxury to me. A doctor
came to give my chest another thumping; he noticed that my
hands and feet were swollen and suggested that kidneys might
be at the root of my physical troubles. He lanced my infected
left foot, heretofore untreated, and sent me some medicine,
a salve, which cured it quickly.

To relieve boredom during the days I killed flies. I picked
up each of the dead carefully, for we slept and ate on that
floor.

Then a major visited us, and in his wake came two of the
restrictive orders that I was to get to know so well. Appar-
ently the guard had complained about the fact that I didn't
sleep weU at night; also that people might see me when I was
sunbathing on the porch. Orders were issued that since I
couldn't sleep well at night I must not He down at all during
the day and this was enforced for more than eighteen months.
I was also ordered to stay off the sunporch and forbidden to
stand up inside the house. For eighteen months I could not
stand up except to go from one spot to another, as my physi-
cal necessities dictated, or on order.

Housing already was at a premium in North Korea al-
though the home-grounds war was just beginning in that
area. But the Communist theory against private property
fixed everything simply by making every private home a
public place to be used as needed. Soldiers moved into homes
with families, or by moving families out. Travelers were
billeted by police order wherever there was a square foot of

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 7 1

space not actually being occupied by somebody else. I think
the woman who cooked for us may actually have owned the
house we were in; we were billeted there with no permission
from her. In the middle of one night the household suddenly
was increased by the arrival of a grandmother, two younger
women, six children, and a major acting as escort for these
families of some high government officials (whose names I
never did learn). They all crowded into the Japanese room
of the house, while my guards, the interpreter, and the lieu-
tenant helped to occupy mine. Remember, this was about
eight feet square. Previously I had been able to sleep over
the warmest flue; now I was lucky to get room enough to lie
down.

During the daylight hours I noticed that one or two United
Nations light aircraft were almost constantly above us, as if
on patrol; and during my last day at Huichon an air strike
plunged down on the railroad area. The interpreter was in
the center of town when the raid came. When he returned
I asked him what the planes had been aiming for.

He said, "The railroad."

I said, "What did they get?"

"One car in the streets," he told me, "one house on a cor-
ner, and two women about four hundred yards from the
railroad."

After the air strike trains continued to run.

That evening I heard a call which was to come frequently,
"Pahli, pahli, pahli!" The rough translation is, "Hurry, hurry,
hurry!" I packed up, which consisted of rolling my blankets,
and presently the entire household except the cook walked to
a police station, where we waited four hours until the same
truck that had brought us to Huichon picked us up again.
The women and children in the major's party also tried to

1 7 2 General Dean's Story

get in. There simply was not room, so finally we pulled away
without the grandmother, a two-year-old girl, the interpreter,
the lieutenant, and one guard. The major, two guards, the
driver, and I were the only adult males. We joined the jam of
northbound traffic, which was steadily growing heavier. This
was a retreat, fast becoming a rout. At midnight we headed
for the mountains to the north.

Our truck was a very high vehicle, open-topped, loaded
with luggage as well as the assorted human cargo. The cold
was bitter, and I wrapped a blanket around my back to keep
warm. After about two hours we came to a stop, blocked by
a traffic jam ahead. We were halfway up a very steep moun-
tain grade, with a two-hundred-foot drop to the right of the
road. The major, the driver, and one guard walked ahead to
investigate the delay, and the other guard stepped off the
truck. I decided to rearrange my blankets around my shoul-
ders. To shift position I stood up and stepped on the front
seat, some seven feet from the ground. Then I yanked at the
blankets behind meand jerked my own feet right out from
under me.

I pitched forward, could not free my hands, and landed on
my head in the gravel. I rolled and went over the top of the
cliff, grabbing for anything and one scrub tree was where
I needed it. I hung on, and the tree held. When I looked up
I was about six feet from the top. A river was two hundred
feet below.

Everyone on the truck began yelling and screaming, and
in a moment U Eun Chur and the major both leaned over the
brink. U reached down, and I scrambled partially up with his
help. When the major reached down I assumed that he too
would help me, but to my amazement he began slapping me
around the head.

A Giin That Wouldn't Fire 1 7 3

I swore at him, "What in the hell do you think you're
doing?" I really spoke sharply, and it seemed to help, even
though he didn't understand English. He stopped slapping
me and gave me a hand until I got back on the road. My head
was bleeding, but I was more scratched than anything else
and I wanted to kill that major with my bare hands. But again
I just wasn't strong enough to try it. Instead I got back on
the truck; and after a long time we moved ahead once more.

Since no one spoke English I had to wait until the interpre-
ter rejoined us, five days later, to find out what in the world
that major thought he was doing. The interpreter then ex-
plained, "He just lost his head and was very sorry. He
thought you were trying to commit suicide, and he would
have been very severely punished if anything had happened
to you."

This occurred on the morning of October 13. In the early
light I saw men in padded uniforms marching south along the
road. They carried cooking utensils suspended from poles on
their shoulders; and Pm quite sure now that they w^ere Chi-
nese troops. The location was about twenty miles north of
Huichon.

Along the way I could see that the war was moving north
almost as fast as we were. In a long valley leading toward
Kanggye, a provincial capital, several villages were on fire,
and aircraft were overhead frequently. Each time they ap-
peared the truck would stop under a tree or beside an em-
bankment, waiting until they passed. Thousands of civilians
walked north along the highway; and from by-ways came
whole cadres of unarmed youths, marching in military forma-
tion under the charge of a soldier or two, carrying pistols. It
looked like a mass mobilization of every male between the
ages of fourteen and fifty.

174 General Dean's Story

The escort major grunted in satisfaction every time we
passed one of these groups, but when we saw the smoking
villages his curses were quite clear, even though in Korean.

We stopped in Kanggye only for orders apparently, then
drove on toward Manpo, reaching Choesin-dong, a suburb,
that same day. Both Manpo, an industrial town with several
large lumber mills, and this suburb, which is a railway junc-
tion, lie on the Yalu River, the border between North Korea
and Manchuria.

My impression that the families with us were of some im-
portance was bolstered when we were assigned billets. They
were taken to one of the largest houses in this little town.
Below the big house was a row of smaller places, perhaps
built for railroad employees in the Japanese era; and I was
taken to one of these. U and Pack, my two guards, went
along. We were shown to a one-room house, with inside
measurements of no more than six by six feet. The room was
one of the filthiest I'd ever seen; and although it had a floor,
I think the soil outside was cleaner. Part of the six-foot square
was occupied by a closet, and the three of us used the rest for
sleeping. Apparently our arrival had moved out a woman and
her two-and-a-half-year-old child, because the child con-
tinued to crawl in and out of the room, and the woman
cooked for us and once or twice came to get something out
of the closet. A young man also stepped over us while we
were sleeping and from the closet got out the uniform of a
second lieutenant in the Security Forces. Rank may have its
privileges in the North Korean Army, but they don't include
keeping a roof over your wife's head. The guards borrowed
some of the lieutenant's cigarettes while he was changing into
his uniform. When they asked him for a light he gave it to
them, without complaint.

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 7 5

I don't know where the woman and child went to sleep,
but assume it must have been in one of the other row houses.
She was still around the following morning, but made no
move to feed us. After a long argument one of the guards
went down toward the center of town and came back with
some cooked pork fat and some sort of sweet roll, such as
are served in Germany.

I had been thinking about escape, of course, and thought
more and more about the possibilities as the North Koreans
moved farther back and more of our planes appeared. But the
hard fact was I still couldn't hope to get anywhere. Even the
hundred-yard walk from the truck to the house had been
enough to leave me panting, my heart pounding with exhaus-
tion. On the way I had to rest several times. Still separated from
an interpreter, I could only guess what was going on. My most
important thought was, "Well, this is still all right, just so
long as they don't start interrogating me again. I can't use
any more of that Colonel Kim."

Oddly enough, there did not seem to be any great jam of
refugees against the Chinese border. Roads had been thronged
with families all the way from Huichon; but in the Manpo
area I couldn't see that the population was terribly swollen.

After three more days in the six-by-six pigsty we moved to
a house in Manpo proper, about three miles away. The offi-
cials' families got a heated room, but the guards and I shared
a Japanese room, without even a habachi. Our breakfast that
morning was the last of the food we had brought north in the
truck, so Sergeant U went into town almost immediately. He
spent most of the day trying to buy some rice. Finally he
came back with a twenty-five-pound sack of it, and some
garlic and pork fat. We had dinner about ten o'clock that
night.

176 General Dean's Story

In each town and each new house we acquired some differ-
ent woman to do the cooking that is, to boil rice and make
a vegetable soup without meat stock. Once in a while we had
a few ounces of meat or chicken; but no matter what the
food is, the North Koreans always prepare it the same way
cut into small chunks, boiled until all the flavor Is gone, then
liberally laced with red pepper.

I appreciate that these different houses, being all much
alike, can mean little to a reader; but each is identified in my
mind with some peculiarity or event. The first Manpo house
had a window from which I was permitted to look because
it was so situated that no one outside could see me. I noticed
from the window that a Russian civilian family was living
across the street a woman, a ten- or twelve-year-old girl, and
a man who must have been somewhat important, because he
had a Korean company-grade officer as driver of his jeep. On
entering Manpo I had also seen three Russian officers strutting
on a street; and in another apartment (or, rather, large room)
of the house we occupied, I had a glimpse one night of a
whole group of Caucasians. These certainly were not Amer-
icans, so I assumed that they too must be Russians.

In three days the officials' families moved out, and we were
able to grab the room with the onder. This ages-old proto-
type of modern heating systems always surprises Westerners
when they first realize how long the Koreans have used the
principle we consider new. But surprise wears off, and the
vagaries of the onder begin to wear on your nerves. Very few
really draw properly, so often more smoke drifts in from the
kitchen of a Korean house than goes under the floor to create
heat. Most onders have two or three flue systems; and almost
always one system works far better than the others.

Stoked with grass and brambles, most onders are fired only

A Gun That Wouldn't Fke 1 7 7

during the cooking of meals. For an hour or so, just at dinner
time and when you are going to bed, there is stifling heat,
which becomes almost intolerable in a tightly closed, crowded
room. As the night wears on, the floor cools off, while the air
outside becomes frigid, until in the morning and through the
day there is very little difference between the zero tempera-
tures inside and outside.

At this house in Manpo the heating system was just about
average, and so was the crowding. Two lieutenants joined
the guards and myself in one room, and a captain moved into
the cold spot we had vacated. In our eight-foot-square room
four people slept while one squatted on guard duty, at which
the lieutenants cheerfully took their turns, under command
of Sergeant U.

Here an exceptional event took place I got a bath. There
were great preparations for the occasion. AH day long the
two guards carried water in buckets to a large Japanese-type
wooden tub in a little bathroom, and a big fire was built in
a sort of stove under it. I assumed that the bath was for me
and, with no interpreter present, tried to make them under-
stand that it should not be too hot I wasn't a Japanese and
therefore didn't want to be parboiled.

My assumption was a little premature on a couple of details.
When I finally got to go into the tiny bathroom, a lieutenant
went with me (perhaps they thought I'd escape with the
steam), and I learned to my sorrow that this was not to be
the hoped-for immersion bath, or Japanese-style self -cooking
session. The Koreans do it differently. We soaped down,
using some of the very hot water scooped from the tub, and
then got some of it cool enough to wash the soap off. But
when I made motions to get into the tub, I found out that
wasn't kosher. You just soap and rinse, and that's all

1 7 8 General Dean's Story

Also, the lieutenant borrowed my bar of soap and used
most of it. It was a highly disappointing evening.

I never did find out what real business these officers had in
Manpo, but I judged that all of them had recently been in
Seoul Each had loot of some sort U. S. .453, cigarettes, six
bottles of penicillin, which they gleefully displayed to one
another. Seoul was repeated again and again in their conver-
sations.

A couple of days later a woman lieutenant joined our little
party and moved into the room with the captain. This should
not be interpreted as anything more than a necessary arrange-
ment. The North Korean Army seemed about as devoid of sex
as any group of young men ever could be. I have no explana-
tion for their apparent lack of interest. None was in posses-
sion of the calendar art which goes along with most armies
(even the Japanese) , and there was apparently no talk about
sex.

The lady lieutenant brought with her a collection of Amer-
ican silk dresses, cosmetics, and a bottle of fine French per-
fume, of which she was especially proud. She should never
have displayed her loot there. While she was present all the
guards were quite friendly, but the moment she left the house
one of the enlisted men went through her luggage like a ter-
rier until he found the bottle of perfume, which he proceeded
to use on his hair as you might use hair tonic. He kept on
pouring until his hair was wet and the bottle half empty. The
place smelled like seven beauty parlors compressed into one.

The woman lieutenant looked familiar to me, and I kept
trying to figure out where I could have seen her. No one
spoke any English except one tall lieutenant, who had Injured
a leg jumping out of a track during an air raid; he also was

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 7 9

suffering from a bad case of hypertension, which made him
jerk continually. He surprised me one day by using his entire
English repertoire. He looked at me, grinned, and said, "Fine,
okay."

On October 17 my dysentery suddenly left me. I was vir-
tually normal for one whole day. Then my kidneys went
haywire, and thereafter that little detail of necessity occupied
much of my thinking and a great deal of time a trip every
fifty minutes, zero weather or not.

About October 20 the interpreter, Tal, appeared. He had
waited two days at Huichon for transportation, then had
walked all the way north. He gave the woman lieutenant a
chance to ask something that apparently had been bothering
her too. She said, "Do you remember ever seeing me before?"

The question made everything fall into place in my mind.
I remembered that day at Chinan, the captain who had bought
me a sack of cookies, and the political instructor who had
tried to hold classes for soldiers while our airplanes were over-
head. This was the same girl. She was delighted when I
remembered her.

At this period our food consisted of rice, soup with occa-
sional bits of meat or chicken in it, and Chinese cabbage tops
cut into a sort of green salad. There was no kimchee, which
annoyed the Koreans more than it annoyed me. The cook was
good, and thoughtful of my needs. When she discovered that
I couldn't eat salad with as much red-pepper seasoning as the
others liked, she would give me a special portion before put-
ting on the pepper. I was getting used to the food and found
myself eating more than half a large bowl of rice at each meal;
in prewar days I couldn't have eaten a quarter of that amount.
But we lived well only for a short time. Guards spent hours

180 General Dean's Story

each day trying to buy enough food, and they no longer could

supply enough for three meals. So we went down to two a day.

We moved once more, to a larger house in Manpo; and De
Soon Yur, the guard left behind in Huichon, rejoined us, after
having walked fourteen days, carrying his own and another
guard's luggage. Tal technically stayed with us, but was sent
away on frequent and mysterious missions for a day or so at
a time. He may have been translating for other prisoner inter-
rogations at some of the POW camps in the area. Once he
returned to ask me for information about the X Corps of the
U. S. Army and Major General Edward (Ned) Almond. I
didn't know that the X Corps had been reactivated and was
delighted to have that information.

This news made me feel better, and so did the general atti-
tude of the people around me. It was apparent that most of
them thought the jig was up. From the presence of the officers
who had been in Seoul I judged that our forces must have
cleared that city on the way north, and from the way they
acted, I thought we must be moving fast.

An even more definite indication of the way things were
going was provided by one of several English-speaking Kore-
ans who came to the house, stayed briefly, and departed. He
waited until a moment when he could not be overheard, then
whispered to me, "Could you walk seventy-eight miles?"

I knew precisely what he had in mind, and that he was
thinking of his own fate as much as mine. I didn't care in the
least, if he really meant it. I said, "Seventy-eight miles? I can
do that on my head. 1 can crawl that far." This might have
been just boasting, because I still was very weak.

He was the one who finally shook his head. "It's very cold,"
he said. "Much snow." While I protested, trying to help him

A Gun That Wouldn't Fire 1 8 1

screw up his courage, he talked himself right out of the idea,
and the opportunity to escape never came so close again.

That walk would have taken me to United Nations lines, but
within days the Chinese struck in force and the great Eighth
Army retreat to the south began.

CHAPTER IX

A. Trip io Manchuria

On what turned out to be the night before we left Manpo, I
was taken for a quarter-mile walk across a soccer field, to a
house without close neighbors. A brand-new cook was already
preparing dinner when we arrived. Also awaiting us were the
lieutenant left behind at Huichon and an English-speaking
civilian. The captain who had been sharing a room with the
lady lieutenant moved with us but left the lady behind. The
big lieutenant with the tic also came along. We were a happy
group, living in an eight-foot-square room. The girl cook,
who turned out to be a sergeant, moved right in with the rest
of us. It was still possible to lie down, but we either rolled
over in concert or not at all. The lieutenant with the jerks,
however, found this a trifle confining. He opened the door of
a closet and slept in there.

The civilian, before we went to bed, told me that he had
hiked all the way from Pyongyang. "It was tough," he said,
"but I didn't mind. I'm glad to do anything for my country."
From his tone I had the definite impression that he didn't
think it would be possible to do things for his country much
longer. The show was just about over. (On October 26
American Marines landed at Wonsan on the east coast of
Korea.)

The next morning I got additional evidence of the same

182

A Trip to Manchuria 1 8 3

sort. Here came the "pahli, pahli, pahli" call once more; and
the captain, noting that I was still wearing summer clothes,
offered me a pair of long woolen underdrawers. I figured he
must know something and accepted them promptly. In a
tearing rush my guards and I set out for a government build-
ing a few blocks away, then waited there. "Hurry up and
wait" as a cardinal principle is not restricted to the American
Army. These people were used to it too.

Trucks were parked in a courtyard, and drivers stood
around a big bonfire in the biting cold, but I was not invited to
join this warming circle. We acquired a new captain as tour-
party director, and our luggage was put into a truck. Three
of us sat in the front seat and a guard hung on the running
board, just in case I might feel like jumping out.

There must be a million Kims in Korea, but the Captain
Kim who now had me in charge was a churlish, English-
speaking lad, whose standard answer to any question was, u lt's
immaterial." I asked him where he had learned English, and
he admitted that he had gone to school in Kokura, Japan, my
old headquarters; thereafter I got no information. He had no
insignia, so I asked his rank. He said that was immaterial. So
was his name, and he did not care, he said, if I merely chose
to call him "Hey, you." He was a very pleasant fellow.

We drove to the Yalu River, and the captain showed a pass
to guards at each end of a pontoon bridge. Thousands of peo-
ple were lined up on the Korean side, waiting to cross, but
our pass got us through the mob and we rolled across the
bridge.

On the west side of the river I noticed immediate differ-
ences. Here were vendors with whole cartloads of meat, more
than I'd seen in months, and other vendors hawked a sort of
corn fluff, just as a delicacy. Mule-drawn vehicles were

1 84 General Dean's Story

common. Uniforms were difficult to distinguish accurately
under the many coats, but they were different from those
worn in Manpo.

I asked Captain Kim if this was the first time he had been
in Manchuria and got a straight lie for an answer. "This isn't
Manchuria/' he said. "This is just a Chinese section of Korea,
like your Chinese section of San Francisco."

I said, "Then what was that river we crossed?" The captain
didn't bother to answer. I was well aware that my transporta-
tion into a neutral country violated the Geneva Convention,
but I was in no mood to protest about it even if there had
been any chance to protest. "This," I thought, "is good. On
this side of the river my chances for getting away are at least
triple what they were in Korea."

We drove a few miles to a town, which must have been
Chian, and stopped in a sort of hotel. We passed through a
kitchen where a mule was walking around and around, turn-
ing a press that squeezed out those lovely corn fluffs. Our
accommodations consisted of a shelf, about six by six, where
four of us slept while one guard remained on duty. I think
the hotel had formerly been a stable, and we were in one of
the stalls.

That night we had an excellent Chinese dinner served from
the kitchen, complete with pork cut up and cooked with lots
of gravy, rice, and soup that had some meat stock in it. This
was a real delight to me; and although this was my first offense
with chopsticks I managed to get all the gravy served to me.

But there's no figuring Koreans. They didn't like this won-
derful food, and the next day set up an elaborate arrange-
ment for getting Korean food the usual watery soup, rice,
and no meatfrom some other place. I had to sit there and

A Trip to Manchuria 185

smell those wonderful Chinese dishes being cooked In the next
room without being able to get any of them.

However, I had to pass through the kitchen several times
during the night. Each time I slipped over to the press,
grabbed a handful of corn fluff, and stuffed it into my mouth.
I felt like a small boy sticking a finger into the icing of his
mother's cake. The mule, fortunately, worked only during
daylight hours, so I didn't have to argue with him.

With four of us sleeping and one on guard on that stall-
sized shelf, there wasn't much room. And the captain turned
out to be a pinwheel sleeper. All night long that bird pivoted
on his head, kicking first one of us, then the others In rotation
as he spun around, without ever waking up. The only person
not miserable was the squatting duty guard, who was thor-
oughly entertained.

It was now October 28, and the weather was bitter cold.
But Chinese flies have that little matter whipped: they all
move Indoors. The hotel was a black mass of them. They
crawled over our faces as we slept. When one of the guards
was sleeping and I was awake, I quite often saw flies wander
in and out of his open mouth at will. Frequently they fought
us for our food, so it wasn't unusual to have a spoonful of rice
flavored with fly. If I had had a swatter I could have killed a
thousand with one blow.

The next day the captain recognized that I needed some-
thing to do. He lent me, temporarily, a book called The His-
tory of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. But pres-
ently he thought he should be studying it himself, so he took
it and left me with his one other volume, a conversational dic-
tionary in Japanese and English, which had been written by
someone in Kyoto, Japan, and was concerned with teaching

1 86 General Dean's Story

Japanese how to order meat or groceries In English. I read It
avidly.

We stayed in Chian until the night of October 30, with me
sitting the whole time on the shelfand absolutely nothing
happened except that Captain Kim bought a big sack of pea-
nuts. I can remember how wonderful those tasted.

The Korean reasoning in taking me to Manchuria can only
be surmised, but to me the most logical explanation is that they
Intended to use my rank as a bargaining point in whatever
peace negotiations might occur. They could not afford to kill
or lose me, and even were forced, in the heat of the military
rout, to take the chance that the Chinese might demand my
custody once we were across the border. I was kept In Chian
the shortest possible time. The moment their military situa-
tion improved I was hauled back east across the river.

That trip, made in a jeep in the midst of a snow and sleet
storm, was bitterly cold. I was crowded into the middle of the
back seat, and one of the guard's suitcases, with very rough
corners, kept bouncing against my shins. This was more pain-
ful than it sounds, and I finally said, "Stop the jeep."

Captain Kim, riding in front, said, "What's the matter?"

I said, "This suitcase is cutting my shins something terrible.
Fd like to stop and pull my feet up above It, or something."

He said, "That's immaterial."

Well, you can take that sort of thing only so long. I said,
'The hell it's immaterial! Stop this jeep right now." I pulled
back my fist as if I were going to hit him.

When I think about it now I can see that almost every time
I tried a real bluff it worked shoving the sentry when I was
a fugitive in the hills, trying to kill Colonel Kim, now this
business of threatening to hit the captain, who could have
mowed me down with one hand in my condition. Perhaps if

A Trip to Manchuria 187

I had been smarter I'd have tried more bluffs and either ac-
quired more concessions or disproved the theory.

But at least I did get the jeep stopped and that snitcase off
my shins. We proceeded to the bridge, at the end of which
benches and temporary kitchens were set up. I couldn't decide
then whether these were for Chinese troops coming in, or
refugees, or prisoners of war. I was constantly on the lookout
for some sign of prisoner-of-war camps, but never saw any.

As we drove into Manpo the snow and sleet continued.
And at a corner I glanced up a side street. Men were marching
there in the snow, their heads bent, their gait that of the very
weary. I saw them only for a moment, and then we had gone
past. Though I looked back frantically I never got another
glimpse of those other American prisoners, plodding through
the night. I can't even swear that they were Americans, but I
don't think I could have been wrong, even in that single
instant.

I was taken to a house in a cluster of three or four, well out
of the center of Manpo; and when we moved into a room next
to the kitchen the family that owned it had to crowd up in the
one other room, away from the heat. During this period I was
always interested for obvious reasons in the latrine facilities
of any new quarters. Here they were unusual. The approach
was over a raised catwalk, hazardous with ice, and the facili-
ties themselves were directly above the pigpen, a sort of
raised perch visible from all directions and open to the winter
winds out of Manchuria. Fortunately for sensibilities, no pork
was served to us during the three days we remained at this
house.

On the night of November 2 we moved again walking
across a soccer field. I was a little confused about the locale
and wondered how many soccer fields there were in North

1 88 General Dean's Story

Korea. When we arrived I found that it was the same place
in which we had been the night before we went to Man-
churia. The girl sergeant-cook, E Sun Koom, and the very
pleasant captain who had given me the woolen underdrawers,
were still there. He was just sitting down to eat an evening
snack of some raw meat, greeted me like an old friend, and
invited me to share it. Although I'd never eaten raw meat
before, this tasted fine, especially the bits of liver.

We stayed put for ten days. From this house I could see out
one window, and watched while a Russian civilian and two
Korean general officers, with a large coterie, discussed loca-
tions of anti-aircraft positions on the hills behind us, then de-
veloped a cleverly camouflaged petroleum and oil dump in a
fold of the same high ground, piling brush over the stored
drums until they were unnoticeable even from where I sat,
close to them.

I also grabbed an opportunity during this time to tell Cap-
tain Kirn, who stayed with us at night, that I wanted to walk
outdoors, for exercise.

He said, u You can't walk in the daytime, because some-
body might see you. We don't want you to be seen. We'll
arrange for you to walk at night."

But I never got that walk. A night or so later there was a
violent argument outside, which sounded to me as if Chinese
were involved in a dispute about quartersand I think I was
right, because we moved, on the night of November 12, to a
large apartment house, in which we had one room with an
onder and another that had been a tatami room until the mat-
ting had been torn off. Now the floors were bare, unheated.
The room with the onder had paper windows, which let in
some light; but almost immediately the guards pasted news-
papers over them, to conserve heat, and made the room quite

A Trip to Manchuria 189

dark. The onder, as usual, didn't work too well and was fired
only at mealtimes, so the room was cold most of the time.

Here we remained until January 12, 1951. It was bitter
cold, Christmas was just another day, and the food steadily
deteriorated. I sat on the floor, crawled on the floor, and slept
on the floor. Much of the time no interpreter was present.
Planes bombed the area, but with less and less frequency. I
guessed at the course of the war by the numbers of Chinese
troops I could see occasionally. (As I learned later, the Chi-
nese entry into the war in October had by this time changed
the whole character of the fighting. United States Marines
and soldiers had to fight their way south from the Yalu River
on the east coast, finally evacuating their battered units from
Hamhung on December 24, 1950. Meanwhile, in the west, the
Eighth Army was driven back rapidly, losing Seoul on Janu-
ary 4, 1951.)

Once Lieutenant Colonel Choi, of the Sunan interrogation
team, came to see me, with more questions to be asked through
the same interpreter, Tal. He was fairly pleasant. He wanted
to know where the ist and 3rd Divisions of the U. S. Army
had been stationed. I told him that I had no idea our divisions
moved frequently and I had been out of touch with these two
since 1947, and I asked him why he wanted to know. He said
a radio broadcast had identified them as divisions being sent to
Japan as occupation troops, replacing units fighting in Korea.
Actually the 3rd Division already was fighting in the X Corps,
in eastern Korea, while the ist remained in Europe, where it
had been for a long time.

I also asked Choi for information about the course of the
war, but he wasn't helpful. "You won't give us any informa-
tion about these divisions," he said, "so why should I tell you
anything?"

190 General Dean's Story

He seized the opportunity, however, to ask if I had now
seen the light and might be willing to cooperatebut almost
in the same breath asked a giveaway question: Was it true
that we were landing two Japanese divisions in Korea?

I told him that I had no information on this, but that of
course there were enough trained Japanese soldiers easily to
fill two divisions, so it was possible. I was struck by the expres-
sion of outright terror which crossed Choi's face. Hatred of
the Japanese is beyond belief in both halves of Korea, but so
is fear of the small soldiers from the islands.

Otherwise Choi was on the evasive side. I complained that
I wanted to take calisthenics daily, and he said, "How much
exercise do you want?"

I told him thirty minutes a day.

He said, "That's too much. You can take ten minutes/'

When I complained about not being allowed to stand or to
walk around the room he said he would have to "take that up
with a higher authority." I asked if there was not some ar-
rangement for dispatching letters to prisoners' families through
a neutral country there must have been some sort of a form
letter so that I could at least tell my family U I am well" or
something to that effect.

Choi said he knew of no such mail arrangement, but that if
I wished to write a letter to my family he would see that it
was mailed. I wrote, with a borrowed pencil and paper (I was
not allowed to have any of my own) , a completely innocuous
letter, saying that I was well. Choi put it in his pocket, where
it may be yet, for all I know. It never was delivered.

He also had one more request before he left he wanted my
woolen underdrawers. They were his, he said, lent to the cap-
tain who had lent them to me. So I returned them, and lived
in summer-weight underclothing for the rest of the month.

A Trip to Manchuria 1 9 1

Except for this visit my days were much alike. I lived with,
but did not particularly help, the every-fifty-minutes kidney
trouble. I sat with my back against a mud-plaster wall and
refought many times the twenty-day campaign before my
separation from my division. I worried about my family and
their finances. Frankly, I had never considered the possibility
of becoming a prisoner of war. I hate to admit it, but I knew
very little about what could be expected from the holding
power, or even about my status with our own Army while a
prisoner. I'd always thought that anyone reported missing in
action was presumed dead after forty-five days and his pay
stopped. So I worried about this, needlessly, much of the time
I was a prisoner.

And over and over again I planned a dinner. This would be
served on my first night of freedom. It would include prime
ribs, an artichoke, a small baked potato with cheese on it and
a good-sized hunk of butter, quick-frozen peas, a big helping
of head lettuce with french dressing, ice cream, and a huge
cup of black -coffee. Those were the most lasting items, al-
though I used up days In considering and rejecting other
components.

But I didn't mind the time. Thinking about food helped to
keep me warm. So did the massaging of my bare toes, hour
after hour. We always were without shoes inside the house, as
in any other Korean house, and I discovered that my feet
seemed to keep warmer without socks. The temperature
hovered around zero, inside as well as out.

I was permitted to wash once a day and worked out a sys-
tem so that I could get a partial sponge bath out of a single
basin of warm water by using a handkerchief as a washcloth.
But it was complicated by the fact that the washcloth, when

192 General Dean's Story

I laid it down beside the pan of water, always froze before I
could pick it up again. I had no idea water could freeze so fast.

Most of the time I watched the Koreans, which wasn't hard,
because ten of us sometimes were living in the one eight-by-
eight room. Captain Kim departed early in November, and
after that the senior sergeant, U Eun Chur, was in charge and
kept them all busy. One man always watched me, at least one
off-duty man always was away trying to buy food, and all of
them spent a great deal of time studying Communist doctrine,
copying page after page in notebooks that were checked by
superiors now and then. The History of the Communist Party
in the Soviet Union was their principal text, and I always
wondered how many of them understood the chapters on dia-
lectic materialism. They appeared to be memorizing it, as
children might study a primer. U held almost nightly review
sessions, and each man was called on to recite. Occasionally he
or some other guard would go away, apparently to attend
more formal classes, then come back to give a complete report
on what he had been told. These things were obvious, al-
though we did not speak each other's language.

Some attempts were made to teach me guards trading me
Korean for English terminology. A typical lesson consisted of
a guard filling a rice bowl with bits of paper, saying, "Ipsu-
mida" then demanding, "American?" I would say, "Full."
Thus I learned Korean terms for full, empty, and other com-
mon situations with some startling results. Ipsumida, I learned
subsequently, also means "I had," or "there is"; while opso-
mida means "I do not have," "There is less," or "gone." De
Soon Yur would ask me, "Sohja empty ? "meaning, "Has
the major gone?" "U full?" meant, "Is (Sergeant) U here?"

Generally these people treated me kindly within the frame-

A Trip to Manchuria 193

work of the restrictive rules. I could not stand or lie down In
the daytime and got my ten minutes' calisthenics in the morn-
ing only under the frowning disapproval of U; but most of
the time I was treated more or less like a member of a big
family. I ate what they ate, including the occasional treats
someone brought in. I was equipped no more poorly than the
others.

These people had no thread, no nails, very little cloth of any
kind, few needles, and no leather. They unraveled old knit
clothing to make new things, laboriously twisting the thin
yarn strands together by hand in order to make thicker skeins.
They resoled their own shoes and mine (somewhat later) with
slices of rubber and fabric cut from old truck tires.

Socks in Korea are not darned but patched. The guards all
patched their own until patches were on top of patches, and
I learned to do the same with mine. But I never tried what I
saw one guard patching another's socks while they still were
on the feet. The one being patched wasn't worried, but the
whole process looked hazardous to me.

Once while I was watching U he must have misread my
interest as disgust or scorn, because he suddenly held up that
sock as if he were going to throw it away and yelled, "Ameri-
can! American!" I was sure he resented the fact that he had to
patch that sock, whereas an American soldier would merely
toss it away. But he had misunderstood my expression. I was
just wondering how in the world you could ever get any
American, soldier or civilian, to be half that frugal.

De Soon Yur, the most kindly of the trio of regular guards,
was exceptionally odd in appearance. Above the waist he was
built like a middleweight, but his legs were those of a twelve-
year-old child. He was the shortest one in the group and

194 General Dean's Story

looked as if he had been mismatched at the belt. He also had
the shortest fingers I've seen on a grown man, but he could do
incredible things with them. He could thread a needle in the
dark; and when anything unusual, from fixing a partition to
carrying a heavy bag of rice, had to be done, he was the one
who accomplished it. U Eun Chur was the old Army man,
and an authority on Communist doctrine. Pack, the youngest
and the brightest of the trio, was notable because the girl-
cook so transparently thought he was wonderful. She shared
her cover with him when we slept and gave him money when
she finally left. But in spite of her perfectly obvious interest
Pack never did anything about it except to carry her luggage
to the railroad station on the final day of her stay.

None of these men ever had any time off, and none received
more than an occasional letter, although both U and De had
families. The only variety in their diet or mine was a very
rare helping of soy beans, roasted, or, in the evening, a bowl
of pop-kay, which is the browned rice that clings to the sides
of the cooking pot and tastes vaguely like toast.

Of this last I never got a full share, although they shared
almost everything else with me. But pop-kay was special, and
it never was a case of reaching into the bowl and helping my-
self, as the others did. Rather, the guards would gather around
the bowl when E Sun Koom brought it in; and Pack or De
would break off a piece of the crusted rice and hand it to me,
while I sat in a corner. For some obscure reason U resented this
and often would grab the bowl and make a point of giving me
none, or would growl a protest when one of the others handed
me a piece. This didn't affect them; but once I got up on my
pride when he made an especially noisy protest and for five
days refused what was offered. Then I realized I wasn't hurt-
ing U in the least, and pride gave way to hunger. Thereafter I

A Trip to Manchuria 195

took what they handed me, like a little child not permitted to
approach the dinner table.

E Sun Koom always was kind to me, making sure that I
got my full share of everything, including her indifferent
cooking; she washed my clothes without complaint and sewed
cotton batting between my two blankets when the cold be-
came so unbearable that I couldn't sleep. Only one thing
about her annoyed me. Each day, after cooking and eating
breakfast, she would wash outdoors, then return to our room
with her hair damp, sit cross-legged on the floor facing the
dim light, and take out a rather elaborate toilet kit, which in-
cluded a bottle of pink hair cream, a popular American brand,
to pour on her hair. Then she'd comb, and glycerine would fly
off the comb into my face as I sat behind her. I wasn't allowed
to move, so all I could do was duck or put up my hands as
shields. The guard on duty always had a real nice laugh.

When E Sun Koom was to leave us I wanted to give her
some present to show my appreciation for her kindness. But-
tons were the only thing I could think of, or had. Everyone
was short of buttons for his clothing and continually stole them
from each other. So I pulled the six ornamental buttons off
the sleeves of my suit coat and gave them to her. She seemed
pleased and grateful, but several days later I saw Pack sewing
those selfsame buttons on his own clothes.

The girl sergeant was replaced by a civilian woman, Pyun,
as cook, and the meals promptly improved. I prefer rice
cooked in the oriental manner rather than as Americans cook
it, and the way Pyun prepared it was better than any other
rice I had in Korea. It had a special fluffiness all its own. She
could even make that Chinese cabbage or Japanese radish
(daikori) soup taste good.

Pyun was in her twenties, had a really beautiful face and

196 General Dean's Story

more figure than most Korean women. But her hands were
those of a day laborer, scarred and blunt. She had smashed the
fingers of her left hand somehow, losing the fingernails and
acquiring a bad infection. To my consternation, she squeezed
blood and pus from these fingers every night, after a hard
day's work, and had no medication except mercurochrome.
I learned eventually that she was the wife of a North Korean
colonel who had been involved in some defalcation before the
war and had been demoted to private as punishment. But he
worked very hard, the guards explained, eventually got an-
other commission, and rose again to major. Their story had a
tragic ending. In 1951 during the same week the major was
killed in action and Pyun died in a bombing raid on a highway.

At Manpo she lived like the rest of us. That is to say, we
tried to keep warm, were kept awake at night by rats gnaw-
ing In the ceiling or in the next room( where they had regular
rat battles), and were kept busy, In any off-hours, hunting
the hard-shelled lice, or cooties, which Infested our clothing.
These beasts loved the seams of clothing, and the only effec-
tive way to kill them was between the fingernails. All of us
spent hours on the hunt. The colder the weather became, the
more of them moved in on us.

For the guards the life was hard and easy, in diff ering details.
They all liked to sleep until nine or ten o'clock In the morn-
ing, which made me unhappy because I normally awake early,
and that hard floor was no place on which to loll and dream
after awaking. But they worked almost without supplies, re-
ceiving during this entire period issues only of canvas shoes
(in midwinter) and some heavy canvas from which they had
to hand-sew duffel bags. I was allowed to make one of these
for myself, and carried It for the rest of my captivity. I also
was issued some winter underwear, a vitally important item,

A Trip to Manchuria 197

on the last day of November. You remember things like that.

There was no regular source of information about the war,
even for the guards. When U would come back from one of
the study sessions he attended, the house seminar talk would
include names of Russian satellite countries and sometimes of
the United Nations, so I presumed they were being briefed on
world events. But there was no newspaper and no radio. I had
heard a radio in the interpreters' room at Sunan (once I heard
the phrase, "This is the Far East Network," before it was
turned down hurriedly), but we never had another that
worked.

We also had difficulty in keeping time. U was entitled to an
issue watch, and he received four different ones. But neither
he nor the other guards could stand to let it go uninspected.
As soon as he would bring one home they would get their
heads together over it, take off the back, then start investigat-
ing the works, lifting out a wheel or two. Sometimes they
would manage to get the wheels back, but none of the watches
survived the treatment for more than five days. I never could
understand how the men knew when to relieve each other on
guard duty.

One thing about the Koreans still arouses my curiosity.
Everywhere I noticed their fine teeth (perhaps I was more
interested than most because of my father's profession as a
dentist) , but never received any adequate explanation for their
excellent condition, which is in such contrast to the mouths
full of gold-covered cavities common in Japan. These people
were great tooth-brushers, spending half an hour a day using
a dry brush with lots of toothpaste on it. I was told once that
the kimchee in their diet was responsible. Certainly their
dentists can't take much credit. In the three years I was a
prisoner several of my guards at one time or another had teeth

198 General Dean's Story

extracted. I honestly believe the teeth were knocked out rather
than pulled; and every patient ended up with a dry socket,
excruciatingly painful for weeks. This appeared to be stand-
ard procedure.

Although I was allowed but two sponge baths at Manpo,
in addition to those I managed with the little washbasin of
water, the guards did a lot of bathing. They made a habit of
doing their daily face- and neck-washing outdoors, stripped
down to the waist even in the coldest weather. Koreans have
told me that in the old days Japanese guards attempting to sin-
gle out Koreans trying to cross on the ferries to Japan without
permission would ask suspects to wash. If the suspect washed
the back of his neck he was thrown off as a Korean and an
impostor, because Japanese never wash there. I do not guar-
antee the accuracy of this story at all.

Many of the things I had resented so much at first became
less important in my mind as I watched the Koreans dealing
with each other. Actually I think they are generally less un-
kind than completely inconsiderate of the rights of a prisoner,
of a pig whose meat they believe will be better if he is killed
very slowly, squealing for hours, or of each other. To them,
I was just an animal to be fed and kept alive. It didn't occur
to them that I had feelings.

For example, when one of them is looking at anything a
photograph, a book, a trophy and another becomes inter-
ested, the second man, with never a by-your-leave, just grabs
the object in question and looks at it himself. Perhaps while
he's looking a third may arrive, and the process is repeated,
still without any sign of an excuse or any Interval for one
person to finish with his inspection.

Or if a roomful of men are sleeping and the guard on duty
feels like singing, he may burst into loud voice and nobody

A Trip to Manchuria 199

complains. At Sunan I had resented more than almost any-
thing else the guards' habit of kicking me with their bare feet
to keep me awake. But that is their way of dealing with each
other the kick is a good method of getting attention, nothing
more.

I also noticed that if one man was busy reading or sewing,
and another spoke to him, no answer was forthcoming. The
first might say, "Pack!" half a dozen times before Pack would
deign to reply, "What?" (or a Korean word that sounds the
same). When men go on duty or report to a sergeant they
always salute, but the noncom or officer saluted replies, if at
all, only with an expression of extreme disgust on his face and
a grunted word. Many times I thought, "Boy, if that happened
to me when I saluted somebody he'd be a long time getting
another salute." But in that army this was standard.

These were the people around me at Manpo, and this their
life, and mine, except for one detail.

That was the lone diversion, a game called chong-gun (gen-
eral officer) and similar to chess. It differs mainly in that the
pieces are moved on the intersections of lines rather than on
the squares, and several pieces have slightly different capabili-
ties. The equivalent of the king and certain added guards may
not leave a restricted number of squares. Knights move two
intersections in one direction and the third on a diagonal.
Pawns are not exchanged when they reach the far side of the
board but move thereafter at a right angle.

O if -duty guards began playing this game soon after we
reached Manpo, having made their own pieces and a rough
board. For several weeks I watched until I thought I under-
stood the game. Finally I challenged U, who seemed to be the
poorest player. I was beaten at first, but I began to get inter-
ested and played regularly with the vociferous help of many

2OO General Dean's Story

kibitzers. In chong-gun, kibitzing is highly vocal, includes
suggesting moves or objecting to them, also the moving of
pieces by a kibitzer, who repeatedly reaches over a player's
shoulder without permission. Players themselves also are free
and easyif one makes a play, then sees that his opponent is
about to exploit an opportunity he has created, he hurriedly
yanks the piece back.

I gave a fair account of myself as a chong-gun player until
the night Colonel Choi and Tal visited me early in November.
The next day a guard shook his head when I got out the
chong-gun board and challenged him. The other two also
refused to play me, so I finally set up the board, intending to
work out moves myself. U, in a growling mood, took it away
from me. Although I still knew only a few isolated words of
Korean, I understood perfectly that there was to be no more
chong-gun for me. Colonel Choi had prohibited it.

Sometimes I could watch while the guards played, but often
one of them sat apparently deliberatelywith his back to me
so that I couldn't even do that.

There were frequent air raids during this period, and each
time we had to take cover in a crowded air-raid shelter, which
I reached by jumping through the one window that would
open. The shelter was used by a number of people, including
a really beautiful Korean woman lieutenant, who apparently
worked in some headquarters nearby, and whose good looks
I had very little chance to appreciate. Two Chinese sentries,
another woman and two children, and all of our household
crowded into that little shelter and my guards, for some rea-
son, always brought along their duffel bags and suitcases. They
seemed to be more interested in getting their possessions pro-
tected than in getting protection for themselves. All of us
crouched, by order, so we really were packed in.

A Trip to Manchuria 201

As 1950 ended, however, the raids were lessening, while the
number of night trains pulling out toward the south increased.
None of this made me feel any better, and I was losing hope.
I had counted on an autumn push of the United Nations
Forces to come all the way to the border. Anti-aircraft fire
also was increasing in our area, including some obviously from
heavy guns. Evidences of military disaster for the enemy,
which I had seen only weeks before, had vanished almost
entirely.

On January 12 I heard the familiar "pahli, pahli, pahli."
Once more I put on all the clothes I had, rolled my blankets,
and prepared to move with no idea as to whether it would be
across the street, to the next block, or a hundred miles.

It was a hundred miles south, and more. We first went back
to Choesin-dong. On the way U covered my head with a
blanket every few minutes, just as we approached some spot
where bombing had done important damage. He acted as if
he were trying to keep me warm, which annoyed me thor-
oughly.

I finally said, "Doggone it, if you're trying to keep me from
seeing, tell me so and 111 get my head down. But if you're try-
ing to keep me warm, let me do it myself." Of course he
understood not a syllable of all this.

At Choesin-dong we stopped only for supper and to get
cotton-padded clothing for each guard and for me trousers,
coat, and a cap with ear muffs. This was distributed by sizes,
and I was mildly amused when the best cap in the allotment,
really a fine number with special buttons on top, turned out
to be the one that fit me but none of the others. While we
were fitting out, the guards chattered to themselves and to me
said repeatedly, "Seoul, okay? Seoul, chosumneida?" They
really thought we were going to Seoul, and so did I.

202 General Dean's Story

We were directed to an open, topless Chinese-made truck,
already loaded with two big drums of gasoline and twenty-
five officers with their luggage. Nine of these were women.
The truck was so crowded that both Pyun and De Soon Yur
had to be left behind.

The only thing uniform about trucks in the North Korean
Army is that none of the starters ever works, and this one was
no exception. But somebody finally wound it into life and we
started southwith a driver who really was unusual in that
he drove in a reasonable manner. U insisted that I sit cross-
legged in the middle of all that crowd, while he stood up,
which I wanted to do, alongside the gasoline drums. Someone
pressed weight on each of my knees, some woman officer's
knees hit me in the middle of the back, and other knees shoved
against my sore shoulder. Every time I moved, this woman
behind me screeched as if I were torturing her. She made
quite a lot of noise about how I was abusing her. Fortunately
for me and my kidneys, that first leg of the trip lasted only
two hours and was broken once by a trouble stop. We spent
the night in a Korean house, where a farm family moved over
to let seven more people sleep.

But sleep didn't come to me. The temperature outside was
six below zero. The house was terribly cracked, and the
biting wind swept through. I noted with astonishment that
the farm family had only light clothing and one big cover of
some sort, under which they all slept. A little boy, three or
four years old, was naked when he stepped over us to go out
once during that sub-zero night; except for the runny nose
common to virtually all small children in Korea, he showed
no ill effects when he came back in and snuggled under the
common family coverlet.

A Trip to Manchuria 203

One of the officers who had been on the truck with us
spoke some English. He said to me, "See, these poor people
cold. Your airplanes make them cold." I gathered that he had
been a resident of Seoul when I was military governor, and
remembered me.

The next morning, when there was an air raid on a nearby-
town I think it was Kanggye we could actually see the
house cracks widen as the bomb blasts shook it. The officer
spoke bitterly to me. "See," he said, "y our airplanes kill inno-
cent farmers and make children suffer."

Again, as when coming north, we traveled only at night,
and the second night was much worse for me than the first.
My position on the truck was even more jammed, I could not
get the truck to stop when I asked, and I was thoroughly
embarrassed. When we did stop again, at dawn and near
Huichon, my feet (I was still wearing for trips the two-sizes-
too-small shoes given me at Chonju) were freezing. When I
tried to walk a few dozen yards to a house I fell repeatedly,
as the composition shoe soles glazed. In spite of my ills and
falls, I remember well the breakfast we were served there the
kimchee was still frozen when it came to the rice bowls.

That night when we were ready to start I had a terrible
time with the shoes. Outdoors I couldn't get them on at all;
but a captain objected violently when I wanted to bring them
inside. After twenty or twenty-five minutes of tugging 1
finally stuffed my feet into them and we were off on another
nightmare ride.

It was a wild and miserable trip, first through the ruins of
Huichon, then past the site of a recent battle. Even in the
dark I could see some of our io5~millimeter artillery pieces
and a few light tanks still standing where they had been

204 General Dean's Story

knocked out, or in ditches; also a few artillery prime movers
and two or three Russian tanks. Villages through which we
passed were in shambles.

Riding south, the officers talked among themselves, and I
gathered that they already had been assigned, some of them to
posts in Seoul, others to Mokpo, in extreme southwest Korea.
I figured we must have been pushed far back a second time. I
thought I myself would surely be taken as far as Seoul, and
I hoped that we would get there soon. I thought, "I know
that country. If I get loose I won't have so far to go to get
away."

We continued southward until we were stopped at a road
intersection by an officer who gave orders that I was to be
taken off the truck. U and Pack, the officer, and I started out
on a side road on foot. The night was very cold and the ground
icy. I fell again and again. They were disgusted with me and
bawled me out in Korean. Angrily I shouted back at them that
if they had let me walk when I had asked for exercise I would
have been able to stay up now. But I'd lost control of my
limbs. I really cussed them out and they evidently cussed me
out, but neither side knew what the other was saying.

We went on, walking and falling, for more than a mile, and
at last reached a house that seemed to be in use as some sort of
an office. And here was Captain Kim, the boss of my Man-
churia junket, whom I never had learned to love. Nor did I
now, although he was delighted to tell me some news: United
Nations troops, he said, had been decisively defeated all along
the line and the few we had left were surrounded, so it would
be only a matter of days until all of them were killed. He
said, "We have many airplanes now, our own airplanes flown
by Koreans who have been trained; and it is only a matter of
a few days until there will be no more Americans on the

A Trip to Manchuria 205

Korean peninsula. Your own press and radio proclaim that
this is another Dunkerque. What do you think?"

I told him I didn't believe the situation was nearly so bad
as he painted it; that if it even approached his description the
American people really would get angry, and that he'd better
be apprehensive about what would happen when we put our
full forces into the field.

He asked about my health and left the building. I've never
seen him since.

CHAPTER X

People? Cola y ana

I expected to resume the trip to Seoul any moment, but my
guess was wild. I was fed but otherwise ignored until the next
evening, when Major Kim of the Sunan interrogating team
took us on another walk, back over the same road we had
traveled the night before. I fell even more frequently than on
the previous trip, so finally Pack offered me the heavy open-
work straw shoes he was wearing, I wasn't happy about
exchanging with him, but in his footgear I could at least get
traction, although my feet were freezing. At last we reached
a small village, which I know is near Sunan but never have
been able to locate exactly. In a house there, we were taken
for a single night to a room that contained, curiously enough,
four beautiful brass-bound chests, but no other furniture. The
other wing of the house was occupied by a platoon of Chinese
soldiers. They paid no attention to me, and my guards kept me
carefully out of sight most of the time.

We had no food all day, but in the evening Sergeant U
returned from a junket with some pork fat and dough. This
is pronounced just as it reads but refers to a steamed rice cake,
prepared by soaking ground rice for a day, pulverizing and
rolling it into patties like potato cakes or rolls, then placing it
in the top of a kettle of boiling water, with straw added to
keep the rice above the level of the water. It tastes precisely

206

People, Cold, and Flies 207

like flour and water, and for a long time I thought that's what
it was. The Koreans consider it a first-class delicacy.

This was the beginning of my worst year a year of two
houses, two caves, many flies, malaria, a succession of odd
guards, and terrific boredom all within a three-mile radius.
This was the year the North Koreans appeared to forget about
Dean almost entirely, and I had difficulty myself in remember-
ing who or where I was, and in maintaining any sort of sanity.

The house I lived in for some months consisted of the
usual kitchen plus one room about eight by twelve feet.
Eventually the room was partitioned so that I had a section
eight feet by four, or slightly narrower, with an open door to
the larger section but no light except what filtered through a
paper window or came around the end or over the top of
the sixty-six-inch-high partition. Most of the time the kitchen
was unused; food was carried to me and my two guards (who
for a time were having to stand watch and watch) from a
house next door. Food wasn't plentiful, and I noticed that the
mention of kogi in the guards' conversation became more and
more frequent as the amount of meat we had to eat became
less and less.

As soon as we moved in I decided that the house, which
was on the edge of a village, had been used as a battalion or
regimental command post by American Forces. Telephone
wires still ran to it, partially obliterated American names still
were scratched on the mud walls, and I found a broken shav-
ing mirror with part of a soldier's serial number still visible
on the wooden back. These few remnants of a lost campaign
did nothing whatever to ease my state of mind, which was
steadily growing lower. The house was small, cold most of
the time, and gloomy with half-light. After the first four days
I never got out of it. Very rudimentary plumbing arrange-

zo8 General Dean's Story

merits were made for me in the kitchen again so that there

would be no opportunity for anybody to see me at any time.

On January 27 De Soon Yur, the short-legged guard,
arrived, having walked more than a hundred and fifty miles
from Manpo in below-zero weather, carrying two bags of his
own and a suitcase U had not been able to get on the truck.
He showed few ill effects, although Pack, riding with us, had
frozen his toes. Blood and pus ran out when he squeezed them,
and eventually he lost the nails, but he escaped infection or
permanent injury. These small men are tough, no matter what
else you may think about them.

De appeared glad to see me, and I felt as if an old friend
had returned. But no sooner had he settled into the guarding
routine than we were upset by the first of a series of person-
nel changes. An officer appeared on January 29 with two new
guards Kirn Song Su and Pak (as differentiated from Pack).
Pack told me, using signs for shoulder boards and the word
pure for stars, that he and De Soon Yur were going to officers'
school. De left that same night, and Pack a day later.

The two new guards were the most friendly I had seen, and
sometimes would let me borrow a pencil when U was not
present. But they continued to enforce the general orders
not standing, not lying down, in the daytime. I slept behind
the partition, with a guard sitting in the doorway where he
could watch me constantly. At first U insisted that I do this
sleeping with my head toward the door; but after great argu-
mentand their own inconvenience in stepping on my head a
couple of times when they wanted equipment from the bags
stored in my room I finally was permitted to shift ends, so
that at least the light by which the guard always was studying
his Communist theory would not be directly in my eyes. This
difficulty in effecting any change in routine, no matter how

People, Cold, and Flies 209

minor, was typical of my treatment. I don't think it was un-
kindness. They just liked the status quo, whatever it happened
to be.

The partition did some good, however. I had not been get-
ting the promised calisthenics; but with this to shield me (and
the guard on duty sometimes dozing or reading) I managed
to get in a few movements daily. I had to be careful, though,
to do nothing that required raising my hands above the parti-
tion, or someone would yell and stop me. Sometimes I could
get in twenty or twenty-five different exercises while they
assumed that I still was sleeping on my straw mat.

Somewhat later I did get permission to walk for ten min-
utes a dayinside my own. little room. I counted off this space
carefully, and one day when a guard let the time run over a
little I managed to get in twenty-five hundred yards of walk-
ing by taking four steps in one direction, then four in the
other, on a diagonal.

When we first came there I was required to sit in the guards'
room all day. Later this became too crowded, so my required
seating was in the doorway between the two rooms. When
they were especially afraid that people coming to the door of
the house might see me, I had to sit in the dark end of my own
little closet. I had nothing to read, but could not have read in
any event. There wasn't enough light.

I took advantage of the two new guards and their kindness
about the pencil. The first time I succeeded in borrowing one
I found a scrap of paper and drew out a calendar, which I hid
in my summer clothing hanging on the wall, along with the
pencil.

But only a couple of days later U staged one of his surprise
knock-down-and-drag-out searches, to which he was addicted,
and found them both. They were taken away from me, and

1 1 o General Dean's Story

he really bawled me out. I couldn't understand his Korean

but had no trouble with the tone. The tone said I had done

something horrible, and he wasn't going to have any more of

it.

Thereafter my only calendar was under the sleeping mat.
In the dirt I would scratch the date each morning, wiping
out the one scratched the previous day and hiding the new
number by adjusting the mat over It. In this way I kept track
of the days for almost a year, and was pleased and proud that
at the end, when I had a chance to check, my date was correct.

Inside the house virtually nothing else happened; but out-
side there was a nightly drama. The village was apparently
the center of a Chinese staging area. Many troops were around
us all the time, and I could hear frequent firing of American
machine guns and M-i rifles on a range somewhere nearby,
as if newly arrived troops were being given opportunities to
foe a few rounds each with captured weapons. Chinese man-
ned some light anti-aircraft positions near us, and their mule-
drawn transport frequently creaked along outside. Now and
then I could hear the dit-dah-dit of a radio from one of the
wagons. My guards occasionally came back with new equip-
ment, which they obviously had obtained in trades with the
Chinese; and quite often I could hear Chinese women soldiers,
who laughed a great deal, talking to the Koreans outside the
house.

At night this friendliness disappeared. Quite obviously the
Chinese were accustomed to using whatever houses they could
find as billets, and they wanted to use ours too. But the
Koreans had definite orders that no one was to see me, so
there was a stalemate, which involved endless arguments,
usually after midnight and often loud and violent. After a
few weeks of this U must have complained, because an officer

People, Cold, and Flies 2 1 1

appeared with four new men De Han Gool, U Bong Song,
Kong, and Um. This made seven guards, ail sleeping in one
eight-by-eight room (less the one always on duty), but some-
how they managed. With all this new help U set up a double
guard one outside the building, one watching me on a
twenty-four-hour basisbut the increased strength was to
combat the Chinese, not me.

I think the Koreans were very much afraid the Chinese
would demand my custody and hang on to me if they ever
found out where I was, and my rank. (This had been obvious
at Manpo, and I also saw later evidence that the custody of
officer-prisoners was a disputed point between them.)

The arguments, however, continued, and one night became
so violent I thought they might start shooting each other. All
the off-duty guards grabbed their weapons and ran out. I
dressed hurriedly, planning to take a little walk away from
there when the fight started but it never did. I took off all
the outdoor clothes again and went on with my exercises.

I had last seen a barber just prior to my interrogation at
Sunan in September 1950. Of course I was not allowed to
have a razor, so once in a while a guard would shave rne, using
ordinary hand soap for cream and a straight-edged razor,
which was also used to cut paper and trim toenails. This was
always an ordeal, and I was delighted that it averaged only
once every seventeen days. Pack, who sometimes shaved me,
just pulled the whiskers out; U, when he did the job, twisted
them off, taking an average of two hours to do an excellent
job. I'm an old twice-a-day shaver, but I didn't even want to
think about it here.

As workmen, the Koreans veered between doing the impos-
sible and doing the ordinary in an impossible way. Their car-
pentry was slap-dash, full of cracks and holes, and likely to

2 1 2 General Dean's Story

fall down at any time. They're sledgehammer mechanics, and
never measure anything if they think they can get by without
it. They'll work and work to make a substitute for something
scarce, such as nails. Whenever they had something to fix,
Fd see one of the men wandering around whatever building
we were occupying, wearing a wild look and searching all
over under the eaves., in the rafters, along the edges of the
floor for something he could use as a nail. I saw one of them
take a piece of old American wire, carefully straighten it, and
cut it off into nail lengths with an ax. But when he was through
with that job he threw away what wire was left, with no
frugality whatever, no thought of the next job he might have
to do.

But the same men were capable of extraordinary handwork,
as illustrated by Pak, one of the new guards. He had acquired
a cigarette lighter and wanted to make it fancier by fitting the
end of a rifle cartridge shell on it. While I watched much too
close he carefully removed the projectile from the cartridge,
took a nail, and prepared to detonate the cap in a crack in the
floor by pounding with a rock. I complained so violently that
he finally went down to the kitchen, but still used the same
system. Of course nothing happened to him, although I would
have blown off a finger if Fd done it.

A day or so later I saw him worrying because Kim Song
Su's watch had no crystal. Pak found an old electric-light bulb,
and as tools located a penknife blade, a rock, and an ax. With
these he cut a watch crystal from the light bulb and it fit
perfectly.

Try it sometime.

Only a few weeks after De Soon Yur and Pack had gone
away, supposedly to officers' school, they returned to guard
duty, but I never was able to find out whether I had misun-

People, Cold, and Flies 213

derstood in the first place or whether their plans had been
changed. Language difficulty left me in the dark whenever
explanations were complicated. By the same token, I was
sometimes confused about just what I was eating. Once, when
we had gone about a month with no meat or fish, the guard
arrived with something he proudly called #& and I got the
idea that it was unborn calf. It was months before I learned
that this quite tasty meat had actually been dog.

During most of the winter months our diversions were
three song sessions, chong-gun, and air raids. To vary their
study routine the guards spent an hour or two in the evening
singing in chorus the usual Inmun Gun and patriotic songs,
and sometimes one would sing for the others what apparently
were old folk songs of his home province. Several of the men
had excellent voices, and I enjoyed it.

The chong-gun was resumed shortly after we came south,
when one of the guards sketched another rough board. I still
was not allowed to play but generally could watch and got a
fairly good idea of the players 5 abilities. I also noticed one
thing: De Soon Yur was a good player, and also clever. Against
a really tough opponent he had one special trick. He would
make a tentative move with his sung (elephant), then take it
back again. All players made such tentative moves, but De
made his count: the sung never went back to the exact spot
from which he had moved it. Instead, it would end up on a
spot from which, two or three moves later, he could make an
effective attack. Apparently none of the other players noticed
this, but I stored the information away for future reference.

The air raids were the most frequent break in our routine.
Our Air Force apparently was aware that this valley had spe-
cial importance, and they worked it over, day after day. A
lot of the attacking planes were light propellor-driven craft,

214 General Dean's Story

which came in so low I thought they might take the roof off
the house. I wasn't sure of the main objectives, but later found
we were close to an important railroad junction, which prob-
ably got the most attention.

In our immediate area, a dozen miles north of Pyongyang,
there seemed to be no heavy anti-aircraft, although I thought
I heard 40-millimeter guns. As the raids increased they got on
the nerves of the troops around, and everybody fired some-
thingburp guns, rifles, small machine guns. The air would be
full of lead flying in all directions. I often wondered how
many casualties that wild and indiscriminate firing must have
caused among their own people.

For me the air raids meant little. At first we did nothing;
later the guards dug a shelter, a trench with a long log-and-
earth covering; one end of it was actually in our kitchen, the
other outdoors. It was so shallow that when I was rushed there
I had to crouch in the mud. When the raids came eight or
ten times a day this got downright tiresome.

On March 3 I had my first official visitation of the year,
from a three-star colonel, who neglected to take off his shoes
when he entered the house a serious insult in any Korean or
Japanese housea major, and an officer-interpreter.

The colonel, who did most of the talking, again told me
that our forces were being driven south and were surrounded.
What did I think? I said I thought we must not be doing too
badly, because I had been told two months earlier that we were
surrounded. So if we still were fighting, it was quite a record.

The colonel also wanted to know what I thought about
pillaging and rape by our troops. He said, "Your men not only
raped young and single women but they raped married
women, pregnant women, and little children, and it was sanc-
tioned by your officers."

People, Cold, and Flies 215

I said that was an outright lie. Officers of the United States
Army do not sanction rape. There are bound to be isolated
cases; but in those cases the man is subject to court-martial. I
myself had approved death sentences imposed by courts-
martial in rape cases.

Suddenly the interpreter spoke up on his own. "That's not
true," he said. "I know you've had rapes. I worked for your
Criminal Intelligence Division, and I know you had troops at
Inchon who committed rape and didn't get the death penalty
when found guilty."

I've never been able to learn the name of this particular
turncoat.

The colonel also wanted me to remember my place. "You've
lost all your dignity," he said. "You must quit trying to act
like a general. Here you are, a prisoner, but even the guard
complains that you try to act like a general. You're no better
than a dog. Stop trying to act superior to the guard."

He went on to more questions: Why did I think the Chinese
"volunteers" had come in and were fighting us?

I said, "Because their master told them to, because Stalin
told them to."

This made them all chatter. The interpreter finally said, "If
the Soviet had wanted to attack they would have attacked
when your troops went to the very border of the Soviet
Union, but not a single Soviet soldier entered the fray. There-
fore the Soviet would not order anyone else to fight. The
reason the Chinese came in is the same reason that you would
take action if there was a burglar in your neighborhood. Our
Chinese brothers saw robbers in their neighbor's house, and
that is why they came to our assistance."

Well, none of this was much fun, but at least I had learned
about the United Nations eastern stab to the Yalu River, which

2 1 6 General Dean's Story

was news to me. The visit came when my morale was low and
my mood bad, and I took the opportunity to do some beefing
of my own. I demanded to be taken to a POW camp, to be
given paper and pencils, to be allowed to stand up, to get more
exercise, and to get outdoors. Previously I had made such
requests just as requests; this time I was half -sick and irritable,
so I made demands. Not that they did any good. The only
answer I got was that these matters would be taken up with
"higher authority." Then my visitors trooped out.

I was mildly amused to notice that word about my attempt
to kill Colonel Kim must have spread. These three cookies
lacked confidence in themselves and kept two special guards
with sub-machine guns at the doors all the time they were in
the house. So far as I could see, there were no changes as a
result of the visit.

On March 6 I became very ill, with severe pains in my right
side. I couldn't eat anything and ran a temperature. Presently
a doctor came to see me; he spoke no English, brought no
interpreter, and there was no noticeable effect except that the
guards permitted me to stay on my sleeping mat during the
days until about March 15. The sickness had passed by then,
but I was terribly weak, and my morale hit a new low. In my
mind I had been prognosticating strategy of the United
Nations Forces, and my guess-day for a major attack was
March 15, when I thought I should be ready to make a break
through the lines. But when the day came I couldn't have
walked a hundred yards, let alone carry out an escape, even
if the attack had come within hearing distance. Actually, Seoul
did fall to United Nations troops on March 1 8, but the advance
ended on the 38th parallel, well south of me.

My morale continued to sink. Finally I realized I had to do
something about it, get something to think about. So I started

People, Cold, and Flies 2 1 7

working simple algebraic problems in my head and playing
mental anagrams how many different words can be made out
of the letters in the name Sacramento? Washington? San Fran-
cisco? Having no paper, I kept score in my head and obtained
simply fantastic totals. I had no way to be sure I was not
duplicating, and someday I want to sit down with a dictionary
and verify my totals.

One day I began working on squares and square roots of
numbers and really got interested. I memorized the squares of
numbers from i to 100. Then I began hunting for fast systems
of squaring. For example, the squares of numbers between 10
and 20 have the same right-hand digits as those between 60 and
70, and the relationship follows through. So the square of 40
is 1600; the square of 41 is 1681, and the square of 42 is 1764
and the square of 90 is 8100, the square of 91 is 8281, and
the square of 92 is 8464.

If you are not interested in mathematics this sort of thing
may drive you to pounding your head against the nearest
wall; but believe me, it kept me from beating my head against
one. I finally rationed myself to squaring five hundred num-
bers a day, no more. So I always had something to do the
next day.

U Eun Chur was still in charge of me during the early part
of the year and continued to waver in his attitude, worrying
terribly when I was sick (perhaps more because of his respon-
sibility than because of any sympathetic interest) , but in vir-
tually the next breath restricting my activities even further.
The top in restrictions came one day when he caught me
counting to myself. My hands were swollen from disuse and
beri-beri, as were my feet, so I had worked out a cross-finger
exercise, which consisted of pressing the thumb and the fore-
finger together five times, hard, then the thumb and second

2 1 8 General Dean's Story

finger five times, and so on across both hands. By then I knew
better than to let the guards see me doing anything unusual,
so I did this exercise with my hand hidden by my side while
I sat on the floor with my back against the wall But as U Eun
Chur passed me once he saw my lips moving. Immediately he
said in Korean, "What are you doing?" and made me under-
stand by mimicking my lip movements.

I said, "Counting il> ee, sahm, sah, oh"
* He scowled, and there was no mistaking his negative, I must
not, he indicated, count without permission.

I'm still of two minds about this man. He was a great
nuisance, enforcing every restrictive rule to the letter and
making up new ones of his own. He had been one of the guards
during some of my worst interrogation sessions, in September
1950, and I'm sure he had taken his cue from the lovable
Colonel Kim.

But U was also a fine soldier and scrupulously fair. As an
officer I admired the way he drilled his squad, made them
study their propaganda, and divided the work. However, my
final experience with him was on the ludicrous side. In this
Communist army, soldiers stealing from each other was the
standard order of procedure. So when a guard acquired some
small personal treasure he often would hide it in my suit-coat
pocket, which hung from nails at the end of my small room.
Sometimes two or three guards had things hidden there simul-
taneously, although for some odd reason no two of them ever
happened to choose the same pocket. Of them all, U was the
only one who never had done it.

On May 6 the guards had a party the first I'd ever known
them to havecomplete with special food, sake, and a great
deal of talk and laughter. In the middle of the festivities U

People, Cold, and Flies 2 1 9

slipped into my room, lifted the back corner of my sleeping
mat, and under it dropped a package of almost a hundred
cigarettes (he knew I didn't smoke), smoothing the mat care-
fully over them. The party continued without interruption.

When, on May n, U came in with another guard for one
of his special surprise searches, I didn't have a thing to find
except one little handkerchief, which I had hemstitched for
myself, with a borrowed needle and small skill, but this became
an issue, although he let me keep it after long argument. Then
he lifted the mat and really did jump up and down and go
into a lather. This obviously was going to be a super perform-
anceuntil I began to laugh. I couldn't help myself. All I
could do was to point at him and repeat, "Tongsun" (you) .

He might have been able to pass it off if the other guard
hadn't been watching his histrionics. Apparently U had been
given those cigarettes for all the men at that May 6 party but
had decided to keep them for himself, then had forgotten them
when he sobered up. Now the only thing he could do was to
make a somewhat shamefaced equal distribution. It was a
trivial thing, but one of the high points of my year.

The next day U came to say good-by. He was wearing the
shoulder boards of a second lieutenant. The May 6 party had
been to celebrate U's upcoming commission.

This was a dismal period. For what they're worth, I think
I should repeat the two clairvoyant obsessions that bothered
me during my lowest moments. These were that both Lieuten-
nant General Walton Walker, of the Eighth Army, and
Colonel Henry (Hank) Hampton, my close personal friend,
had been killed. I'm positive that no one had mentioned either
name to me for months, but I was just as sure as if I had read
the news somewhere. I even had datesearly November for

220 General Dean's Story

Colonel Hampton and early January for General Walker, and
was sure General Walker's had come from artillery fire while
he was visiting the front lines.

In midsummer I learned that I had been right about Gen-
eral Walker's death, although wrong about the time and cir-
cumstances; and after I was released I found that Colonel
Hampton had indeed been killed at Suwon in the autumn. I
have no explanation.

De Soon Yur took over as chief guard when U left, but my
situation improved more slowly than I had hoped. I still could
not stand or lie down during the day, and De apparently was
afraid to modify those orders. I had another week-long sick
spell hepatitis, I think. Bombers increased their raids in the
long spring days, and we spent a lot of time in that stinking
air-raid trench.

I objected to the trench on various grounds, among them
the fact that going to it interfered with my newest game-
killing flies. I had done a little strictly amateur fly-killing the
previous autumn; now I got serious about it. In April 195 1 the
first of the season's fly crop appeared, and I started batting at
them with my palm and keeping track of strikes and hits. I
had to keep my records mentally, but I ended May with an
even three hundred flies killed and a batting average just over
.300. In the first half of June my average was better but total
hits were the same an even three hundred. Then De pre-
sented me with a fly-swatter he had manufactured from a
willow branch and the old half-sole of a shoe. My average
immediately took a terrific jump to .760. I was studying flies
and think I eventually might have batted .850. The trick is
never to try to swat a fly when he's standing still. Wait until
he starts walking, or lifts his front feet to wash. Then you bust
him, because he can't take off without shifting position first.

People, Cold, and Flies 2 2 i

The guards were interested but Insisted that I couldn't count
my score unless I produced the corpus delicti. So I carefully
saved each deceased fly during the day, then crawled over to
present them at night. This really was a dignified procedure.
A guard would lend me a pencil to put down my total kill
and batting average for the day. My June total (half the time
with the swatter) was 2866. I had already figured this in my
head; so when the time came for the official scoring I merely
put down the blows struck and totals without adding the
columns. This fascinated one guard, who immediately checked
my columns and claimed to have found an error. I rapidly
added it and got my original answer, but he still insisted I was
wrong. We argued loudly, in two languages, and then I fool-
ishly became provoked, tore up the paper score, and told them
to keep their flies, damn them.

Both De and the other guard were angry, and I kicked
myself for indiscretion I was afraid they might take away
my swatter. But nothing happened except that I no longer
counted total strokes.

Just to keep this vitally important record straight, my top
day in 1951 was 492 kills; but my all-time best, In 1953, was
a 522-fly day. I killed 11,016 in 1951; 25,475 in 1952, but in
1953 lost interest and murdered only 41 Sofor a grand total
of 40,671. Anyone who wants to challenge my three-year
swatting record will have to show r me the flies.

I was not the only one periodically miserable during the
first part of this year. Kong, one of the new guards, was older
than most of the others, and became ill soon after he was
assigned to watch me. For days he lay on the floor, rolling in
agony and coughing almost constantly. I was sure he had
tuberculosis, plus some stomach disorder. Finally he was taken
away, presumably to a hospital, and was gone for three weeks.

222 General Dean's Story

When he came back his side had been split by a large wound,
from which a drain still protruded. I thought he must have
been operated on for an appendix which already had burst.
He went back to limited guard duty, still coughing and
spitting regularly.

My own second sick spell left me even weaker than before
and again put off any half-formed escape plans I had. Even
when I went to the kitchen, which also was my personal
latrine, my legs sometimes would collapse; and a couple of
times I passed out completely, just trying to walk. I don't
think I'm normally a hypochondriac, but I was convinced
that I had cancer of the gall bladder.

A doctor was called to see me and at least he knew exactly
where to press my abdomen so that it hurt the most. Through
an interpreter he asked me what I would like most to eat if I
were at home. I think he expected me to say something about
steak, but the thing which sounded best to me was milk toast.
I said, "Hot milk toast with lots of butter on it"; I knew im-
mediately that I'd made a mistake they couldn't possibly
provide that, and they didn't even try. If I'd asked for some-
thing reasonable, perhaps they would have. The doctor ruined
my opinion of his diagnostic ability, however, with one more
question. Had I, he wondered, ever had a venereal disease? I
was happy to tell him I had not. When I showed him my feet,
still swollen and as painful as if they had just been frost-bitten,
he was not in the least interested. So I continued to go bare-
foot because I no longer could get my socks on.

In the spring the food routine was changed. All the guards
but the man actually on duty went next door for meals, but
the duty guard's food and mine was brought to us. For a
while we ate together; but one of the new people obviously
thought it was beneath his dignity to eat with a prisoner, so

People, Cold, and Flies 223

set my food on the floor by the door of my room. Shortly
afterward this became a standard practice.

The guards now were getting some military training, which
they had not received all winter; and in the spring De con-
ducted extensive calisthenics every morning. But I still got
mine, if at all, in my room, and each day faced the dilemma
of whether to get my full exercise while the off-duty guards
were outside running and jumping or to wash my face. Wash-
ing was always a problem, and if I didn't get it done at this
hour I seldom had a chance later. This too had to be handled
with extreme caution. The surest way to miss a day's wash
was to ask some guard directly for permission to do it. The
answer almost always was a negative, although if he thought
of it himself, washing was a good idea.

As the summer progressed and my fly-ldlling became more
of a full-time operation, washing acquired special importance.
Every time I'd smack a fly especially when I was doing it
with my palm I'd raise a cloud of dust, and by the end of a
day my face and hands would be filthy. So missing one of iny
daily chances to wash represented an esthetic as well as a
practical problem.

The mosquitoes also were getting worse. Some of them
hatched in the water always in the bottom of that air-raid
trench, which was convenient for them, and other hundreds
came in from outside. I noted that a great many of them had
the habit typical of malaria-bearing mosquitoes of standing
on their heads when they took a hunk out of you. In the
morning when I was dressing I'd use my fly-swatter on the
ceiling, and the whole ceiling and wall would be bloody with
the carcasses. But they still came in.

The guards occasionally got sufficiently interested in my fly
campaign to swat a few themselves usually choosing a time

224 General Dean's Story

when I was just trying for a big score and borrowing my
swatter. But their system of controlling mosquitoes was to
build an evening fire in the onder, even on the hottest nights,
which made the floor so hot that we slept in pools of perspira-
tion. Sometimes they brought in a hibachi, the iron kettle
containing not only charcoal but a few brambles, which almost
suffocated us with charcoal fumes and smoke. Neither had
any noticeable effect on the mosquitoes.

Or the flies. My campaign kept down the number in the
area where I was allowed to hunt, and this helped my comfort
some but had one effect on which I hadn't counted. As the
flies got worse more and more of the guards would sleep, dur-
ing their off hours, in my little room, in order to get away
from the flies. If a man was sleeping I couldn't get even my
fifteen minutes a day of walking.

Our deadly routine was broken once when De Soon Yur's
wife walked sixty miles from Haeju to see him and he took a
night off in celebration the first time I'd known any of the
men to get a pass for personal reasons. De's wife brought him
some very fine hand-worked underwear, also a bag of peanuts,
of which I was given a few. After a winter of almost unre-
lieved rice they tasted wonderful.

On July 5 I had another visitorMajor Kim, with an inter-
preter, Captain Oh Ki Man. Kim said he had just come to see
how I was getting along and did I think the war could be
ended by negotiation? I said I doubted it. As I remember, I
stated, "I don't think there would be a chance in the world.
The United States never starts wars; but when we do fight
them, we fight to win. And we do win."

Kim said, "I didn't come to argue, but I feel that the only
way the war can be ended so there is a permanent peace is by
negotiation."

People, Cold, and Flies 225

In early summer some of the guards were away for days,
helping nearby farmers put in their crops. And all during July
virtually all of the off-duty men were gone during daylight.
On July 1 7 De Soon Yur announced with obvious pride that
we were going to move to a "trenchee" he had picked up the
word from my designation of the air-raid shelter. That night
we packed all our things, and three guards and I struggled
out in the dark and about two hundred yards up the steep
hill directly behind the house.

Here we entered a covered trench dug across the side of the
hill. It was six feet wide, about fourteen feet long, and barely
high enough for a man to stand between the rafters support-
Ing a dirt-and-log roof. It was entered through a right angle
at one end, and the floor was three feet below the doorsill.
Five-foot bunks for two guards were in the main tunnel, and
at the far end a bay had been dug back into the hill. This five-
by-six-foot haven was all for me. Three and a half feet of the
width was occupied by a wooden bench, my sleeping couch
by night, my sitting room by day.

The cave, De assured me, would protect us against pi-yang-
gi (airplanes) and flies. Although the summer outside was
boiling hot, the cave was dank, full of mosquitoes, chilly, and
completely airless. I put on my heavy underwear and winter
clothing to keep warm. De had assured me that I would get
sunbaths and outdoor walks at the cave, but I got neither,
partially because of the weather. Rain started as soon as we
moved in, and continued for daysrain such as I've seen only
in Korea. The sky just bucketed. On the chilliest days the
guard would bring in a hibachi, which raised the temperature
a couple of degrees but filled the cave with choking charcoal
fumes. The roof leaked, and guards dug ditches in a fruitless
effort to drain the water off the floor.

226 General Dean's Story

Robbed of my fly-killing pastime, I spent my time looking
at the rock walls, which contained mica, quartz, and, I'm sure,
a few flecks of gold, and massaging my sore feet.

Food was poor that summer. Besides the diluted rice, about
all we had were garlic beads and tops, the latter chopped up
and extremely hot. They burned all the way down, and my
stomach never stopped burning until it was time to eat more
of them. My dysentery was back, so I was a little more miser-
able than before.

On about July 24 a day I should remember more exactly
a guard came home from the town with a loaf of bread. I felt
like putting my torn-off chunk of it up somewhere, just to
look at, but wonder gave way to hunger. I told the guard to
forget about any other food that day. I didn't want anything
else to spoil the taste of that wonderful bread. I learned later
that De, worried about my inability to eat as many red-hot
garlic tops as the guards, had gone to headquarters and stirred
up such a racket that my food allowance was increased to 800
ton a day, compared to the 500 allowed for each guard, and
to the sergeant's basic pay of 1250 ton a month. That loaf
of bread represented the first of the ration increase and was
also the first I had seen since early in September 1950.

CHAPTER XI

My Friend WiJfrel Burchett

The rains continued, the roof leaked steadily, and the floor
drains clogged. Some time after midnight on July 3 1 a guard
shook me awake. I put on my clothes but was told to leave
everything else and stepped down from my wooden bench
into water already almost waist-deep. It had covered the
guards' bunks, a little lower than my own, and still was rising.
We splashed the length of the tunnel, getting soaked to the
armpits when we had to stoop under the roof beams, and, in
pouring rain, sloshed back down the hill to our village castle.
Three sleeping guards were routed out of my four-by-eight
special section, and an old woman and a child, who had moved
into the main room, were ousted the next day.

The rain kept right on coming. The air-raid trench filled
and overflowed into the kitchen, and the mosquitoes had a
wonderful time.

The guards were doing the cooking themselves, for a
change, and once a glorious day they secured some potatoes.
Boiled potatoes and rice may not sound like much of a dinner,
but then well, I still remember it, although now I have trouble
figuring out why I should have been so overjoyed.

This arrangement continued only a few days. Then a
woman was hired as a cook, which made it bad for me because
the guards were adamant that she must never see me. Although

227

228 General Dean's Story

she was there only at mealtime, this meant that I spent even
more time in my lightless closet, and could not even run up
my fly-killing score during those hours, for fear she might
hear the swatting. I don't know how they explained to her
the extra man's ration and extra rice bowl used at each meal.

On August 4 I began to run a fever with a typical malarial
four-day cycle, which left me sleepless and half out of my
head. I was gradually going insane from the sound of a wall
clock, which hung in the guards' room where I could not see
it. I swear this Korean clock made a special dull sound, dih-
dah, rather than a normal ticktock; and I beat my brains out
trying to figure the time from the sound. I couldn't get enough
water to drink and was becoming more and more delirious.
Finally I scratched a note, "Quinine or atabrine," and De went
off to see a iveesah (doctor), who I hoped would get the note
translated somehow.

To my delight De came back in only a few hours with five
big yellow atabrine pills, which gave me almost immediate
relief. In Tokyo much later, U. S. Army doctors told me this
may have saved me, in my weakened condition. Atabrine is a
treatment for dysentery as well as for malaria.

When I began to feel better I thought once more about
escape. Summer was full, brush was leafed out, and the fields
were full of corn and other vegetables. If I ever was going to
get through, this was the time. Fortunately we were getting a
little dried fish with our rice just then, and I began to save it.
I'd eat just enough to leave a few bones in my rice bowl for
the guards and the cook to see, wrapped the rest in scraps of
papers, and hid it in the pockets of the trousers hanging on the
wall. After U left there were no more sudden searches of my
belongings, so it was fairly safe.

On August 15 Major Kim came again. This time I found

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 229

out, after much muddled translation, that he wanted informa-
tion about Robert Lovett. He was quite disappointed when I
could tell him only that I didn't know the Secretary of De-
fense. It was he who told me then that General Walker had
been killed the previous winter.

By September 6 I felt almost normal physically, for the first
time in months, and my escape plans began to take definite
shape. Again I picked a date for a United Nations offensive-
September 15 or October i and hoped to be ready for it. I
was saving dried fish like mad. But the guards were talking
about moving back to the trench, on which they had been
working ever since the heavy rains stopped, and I knew I'd
have to get away before we moved. From the inside room of a
cave, escape is too difficult to think about.

Major Kim visited me once more, on September 15. The
interpreter, Captain Oh, explained that the date was Korean
Thanksgiving Day, by the lunar calendar, and that on this
date gifts were exchanged and visits made to friends. Kim
brought me two dozen apples as a gift; also some more ques-
tions, just to pass the time of day: How in the world did I
think we could win the war by fighting when we were being
defeated at every turn? What political party did I belong to?
What were the political affiliations of Generals MacArthur,
Marshall, and Bradley? Then suddenly he asked, "Did you
know that General MacArthur has been dismissed? "

I said, "No."

He said, "Yes, he was dismissed last spring."

I said, "That news is a great shock to me." But I could get
no further details.

Each of us ate an apple then, and I enjoyed mine thor-
oughly. After the visitors had gone I gave the guards the rest
except for four; but the next day De came into my room to

230 General Dean's Story

tell me sad news. Pack was ill. He said, "Poor Pack" a few
times, until I got the idea that the only thing Pack needed as
a cure was an apple-a sagwah. Pack had been good to me,
so I gave De two apples for him. I'm not entirely sure that
Pack got them both.

The next day I felt that Pd Hke to eat an apple myself. I
waited until no one was around except De, broke an apple,
and gave him half, eating the other half myself. The following
day I repeated this procedure with another guardand all the
apples were gone. So out of my gift of two dozen, I actually
got to eat two. But guards frequently shared their special
treats with me, so it evened out.

It was now a race between an opportunity for escape and
moving back to the trench, but it never came to a showdown.
Instead, I got another fine attack of malaria, which laid me
flat on my back. This time, I called for medicine on the sec-
ond day of it, and De again secured five atabrine tablets. They
worked, but not soon enough. The day I was able to wiggle
we moved back up to the repaired and improved cave.

So I ate the hoarded fish, to keep it from spoiling. The
United Nations attack had not been on schedule anyhow, so
perhaps it was just as well. I thought, "Well, the United
States has probably had general mobilization by this time.
They weren't able to get a full-scale attack mounted by
autumn, but it will come March 15 of next year. On March
15, Dean, you've got to be in shape to get away and meet them
on the beaches."

The cave was much improved, larger and better ventilated.
At the entrance a wall was built up on one side, and occasion-
ally I was allowed to sit beside it for a sunbath. As added
insurance that no one would see me, guards cut saplings and
stuck them into the ground, forming an artificial greenery

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 2 3 1

wall almost all around the cave entrance. I was also allowed
to walk in an area just six paces long. Once in a while I man-
aged to get in half a mile of walking in this space before
somebody made me stop. Food was improving, in fits and
starts. Once I was given a whole pound of butter, which I
put in my soup, a spoonful per bowl, in place of meat stock,
and four cans of Soviet-supplied evaporated milk, which I
shared with the guards. They didn't care for butter, so I got
all of that. Life in the cave wasn't bad, and I thought that I
wouldn't mind if we stayed there all winter.

But on October 29 I was told to get ready to move again.
I asked if our troops were advancing, and got no answer.
Nevertheless I was sure that was what had happened, and that
we'd be taking another one of those long cold rides to the
north again. I thought, "Manpo, here we come!" And this
time I decided to be ready for the trip. I put on everything I
had woolen underwear, then a pair of shorts, then the Korean
cotton underwear I had been given, about three pairs of socks,
my summer trousers, and then my Chinese padded trousers.
I had on a shirt, a U. S. fatigue jacket, a summer suit coat,
and a padded coat.

1 was so bundled up I could hardly waddle, but at least I
would be warm. When we started to walk from the cave De
also put his cap on my head, so I'd be further disguised. We
got into a jeep one officer with no rank insignia, a driver, De
Soon Yur, and De Han Gool, I in my padded layers of cloth-
ing, and all our gear, including my blanket roll and a thin
cotton pad. That jeep bulged but got under way.

We started south, not north, then cut to the east across a
railroad, and finally back north up on a ridge, where we
stopped. I thought, "Well, we're going to walk to Manpo,
but it won't be too tough now. I'm in fairly good shape."

232 General Dean's Story

However, we went down a trail only about a half-mile and
came to the rear end of a newly built little concrete house,
stuck right into the side of a hill, with the roof camouflaged
by dirt. The whole building was only about seven and a half
by twelve feet. It was divided into two sleeping rooms, plus
the usual kitchen and onder-firing space, and I was shown to
a room five by seven and a half feet, which had in it a three-
foot-wide bench, so that standing space was an aisle two feet
wide. There were two small windows, not big enough to
stick my head through, but with real glass in them.

The house had been built especially for me. We had driven
about three miles but were less than a mile and a half from
the village where we had stayed since January 1951. Our
food still came from the same kitchen, and guards had to
walk over for it every day.

I was delighted. This was the cleanest building I'd seen in
North Koreaand I had no desire to go north, adding to the
miles I'd have to come back when I did get around to
escaping.

For the guards one of the most important factors was that
this house was away from Chinese concentrations. They could
relax about keeping people from sharing my quarters and
finding out about me. But there were difficulties. The onder
didn't work, and they had to tear up the floor (of poor quality
cement, which seemed to be in ample supply) a couple of
times to remake the flues. And their own quarters were im-
possibly cramped until they cut down the size of the kitchen
and added a foot or two to their own sleeping space.

My treatment improved some. De allowed me a few forty-
five-minute sunbaths outdoors, screened by another row of
saplings cut and set up in the dirt between the house and the
latrine, twelve yards away. But when a young Korean officer

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 233

inspecting the place caught me seated on my bench doing
calisthenics, he apparently objected. Thereafter De informed
me they were prohibited unless I had special permission al-
though I still got my few minutes each morning.

Otherwise life proceeded almost exactly as it had before,
with a couple of added diversions. The new house was clean,
but that sod-covered roof proved a special attraction for North
Korean rats, who knew as well as anybody that a hard winter
was on the way. These characters proceeded with all speed
to dig tunnels for themselves under the sod, then kept on
burrowing, down toward the heat of the room. That was their
mistake. Terrible engineers, those rats. They dug so deep that
only a thin skin of paper and dirt was between them and the
open room below, and their tunnels took in water from the
upper ends. The result was that the roof leakedwater much
of the time, rats now and then. I don't know why every rat
who fell through the ceiling had to choose a spot directly
over my head, but it seemed to me they did. At least five times
wildly flailing rats landed on my face while I was asleep.

This was disconcerting to me, and unfortunate for the
rats. Each time it happened the whole house went into pande-
monium while the guards held a wild and woolly rat hunt.
It might not have been so bad if they had used an American
system, just swinging clubs around until they beat the rat to
death; but their system was to get him with a sharp-pointed
instrument, a pencil, dagger, or bayonet, stabbing him to
death.

There was always a terrific battle, and the rat always lost.
The carnage was terrible. Four or five men would be in my
tiny room at once, all stabbing. By the time they finally got
the rat the room looked as if it had been bombed.

Suddenly, on December 19, Dean's prison life changed. The

234 General Dean's Story

first Indication was another visit from Major Kim and Cap-
tain Oh, who arrived about ten p.m. and for once posed no
new questions about the course of the war. Instead Kim said,
"Wouldn't you like to write a letter to your wife? You don't
want your family to worry. Don't you want to write and tell
them you're all right?"

I felt something strange in the conversation, but I said only
that I'd written a letter a year before and had given it to
Colonel Choi, who'd promised to mail it.

Both of them said, "Oh? We didn't know about that." They
insisted that I write another anyhowand do it that night.
Kim provided a pen and paper and seated me on the floor at
a wobbly little table in the larger room of the house. The
house was wired for electricity, but our bombers had been
busy on the transmission lines, so we had only an oil can with
a wick in it for light.

I had been without any sort of writing implement in my
hand for sixteen months, except to make a few figures, and I
had trouble. I was horrified at my own script. My N's looked
like M's, and my M's like nothing legible. I struggled through
a letter to Mildred, then tried to read it, but I couldn't even
make it out myself, so I rewrote it twice more. Then Captain
Oh read it aloud, in Korean, but it wouldn't do, because I had
started: "This is a red-letter day in my life. I have just been
told that I can have a pencil, and that I can write to you"

That part about a pencil wouldn't pass, Major Kim said.
I did the whole letter over, foolishly without insisting that
they read all of it first. So the next version also was turned
down, this time because I had written, farther down: "T
haven't seen a fellow American since July 1950."

Version number five finally was approved, well after mid-
night. Major Kim said, "Who else do you want to write to?"

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 235

I said, "I don't want to write to anyone else tonight. I'll
write tomorrow."

He said, "Oh no. It must be tonight."

So finally I wrote another letter, to my daughter, and dated
It the twentieth. I had to make only two copies to get one that
was legible. When I simply was too tired to write any more
the two officers left, carrying my letters and some photos
taken at Pyongyang shortly after my capture. These they had
brought to have me sign, to show that they were genuine.

In January 1952, when I got my first mail, I learned what
all the rush had been that night. Those two letters of mine
were turned over to United Nations representatives as the
first letters in the original exchange of prisoner mail, on De-
cember 20 or 21. But before they were given to our people
the texts were furnished to the Communist press.

I slept very little that night. I was excited about having
a pencil. And in the morning I had another visitor a major
general, no less, named Lee. With him was my old chum,
Lieutenant Colonel Choi. This gave me an opportunity for
which I'd been waiting, and I let Choi have it. One of the
first things I said to the general was, "This is the man who
told me that I could wash twice a day, and I've never been
permitted to do it. Why?" I was getting adept at their own
type of phraseology. "This is the man who was going to
take up with higher authority my request to go to a POW
camp. All right, what does higher authority say about it?
This is the man who gave orders that I wasn't to play chong-
gun. Why?"

The general was making a big act out of being friendly,
so I really poured it on old Choi. Choi squirmed. He said,
"Oh, I didn't say you couldn't play chong-gun."

I said, "Then why was I stopped immediately after you

2 3 6 General Dean's Story

visited me on the third of November last year? As soon as

you left the guards said they had orders against it. Why is

that? 75

Choi said, 'That must have been Colonel Kim who gave

those orders."

The general was friendly but answered few questions and
said nothing to my other demands-for exercise, for sun-
baths, for something to read. I never learned what, if any-
thing, he did to Choi, nor do I care, but he himself was
demoted later for having failed to visit me, for having per-
mitted such orders, and for my general treatment. I learned
this months afterward, and it looked to me as if they were
making old General Lee a goat for what undoubtedly was
a general prisoner-of-war policy they now wished to re-
pudiate.

But this day everything was just dandy. The general didn't
approve of the thin cotton pad on my bed, so it was replaced
by one much thicker. He ordered a sheet for me, so an aide
brought in a strip of cotton cloth about twenty inches wide
and seven and a half feet long. I never figured out what to
do with it. To replace my summer-weight suit, the aide
produced a pin-stripe woolen made in Eastern Germany and
a new shirt of some material like nylon. The shirt was so
small in the neck that I couldn't fasten the collar, and the
sleeves caught me at about the elbows. So it was taken away
again, but they forgot to bring a replacement.

Finally Lee suggested that I have a drink with him. The
aide brought in a half-pound of butter in a tin, sliced bread,
dried devilfish, black fish eggs, and sake. We sat down, and
the general began to ask questions: What did I think about
the war? Did I think we had any chance at all? Then he
launched into a long statement, the gist of which was that

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 237

we couldn't possibly win. The United Nations Forces had
missed their opportunity when the North Koreans were at
their lowest point; and having failed then, we never would
be able to win. They had solved their principal problem,
transportation, and I must know how important that was to
an army. Now they were getting stronger all the time; and
no matter what we did, we never could make it as bad again
as tilings already had been. There was only one ultimate
victor: the Inmun Gun, the People's Army.

I didn't do much talking, because I was too busy eating.
The butter was delicious, and this was the first sliced bread
I had seen. The fish eggs and the devilfish also were wonder-
ful. I don't care for sake, but I drank two small cups of that
too. The general ate very little. When I had finished he in-
dicated that I could keep what remainedbutter and sake. But
after he left I learned that I had misunderstood him. He
meant that I could have the sake; the aide came back and got
the rest of the butter.

Early the next morning, December 21, Captain Oh was
back. Would I state that I had not been beaten? "It would be,"
he said, "a great favor to the general, who wants to be your
friend and to treat you kindly; also a favor to me. The gen-
eral may be punished unless you do this for him."

I suppose that I'm a sucker for people who ask favors,
but I was grateful to De Soon Yur, if not to the general.
I mentioned De's kindness and demanded again that I be taken
to a POW camp so that I could see how other prisoners were
being treated. I said: "As senior prisoner of war" I knew
from what the different interrogators had said that I was the
senior "it is my duty to know how other prisoners are being
treated and to see that their interests are protected, that they
are being accorded the treatment provided by the Geneva Con-

238 General Dean's Story

vention." This was the same request I had made verbally many
rimes, to which the answer had been that the question would
have to be taken up with "higher authority." When "higher
authority" got the request, if he ever did, he didn't bother to
answer at all.

That evening I began to understand some of the reasons
for all the hoorah of the previous few hours. As I was getting
ready for bed I heard people outside the house. When 1
looked from my room into the guards' seven-by-seven quar-
ters, a whole group was coming in, all but one either Chinese
or Korean, many of them with cameras. At the head of the
group was an Occidental, just removing his boots. He strolled
across the room, which wasn't much of a stroll, grinned
widely, and held out his hand.

He said, "Hello, General Dean. I'm Wilfred Burchett, the
correspondent for Le Soir, a French Left-wing newspaper."

I shook hands with him. In fact, I was so glad to see another
Caucasian that I felt like throwing my arms around him. I
asked him his name a second time and added, "Are you
American or British? "

He said, "Fm an Australian, and Fve come to get your
story of how you were captured. Won't you come in and
sit down?" I was still standing in the door of my room, and
he indicated a spot In the center of the floor in the guards'
quarters.

By that time there was a solid circle in the little room. All
the Chinese and Korean newspapermen were getting their
notebooks ready. I could hardly take my eyes off Burchett,
a fellow Caucasian. You have no idea how important that
can be after a year and a half. Burchett, Captain Oh, who
had come along to interpret the conversation between Bur-
chett and me for the benefit of the Oriental correspondents,

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 239

and I sat in the center, cross-legged like the rest, and directly
above the onder, which was going full blast. The floor was
so hot that we sat there only a moment before getting blankets
to fold under us. Still we sweated profusely.

Burchett said, "Now, to get started, I'd like to ask you
what you know about the war situation."

I said I knew very little about anything that had happened
since July 1950.

"Then I'll bring you up to date," he said. "I'll brief you."
And to my amazement (after months of savoring the tiniest
tidbit of news) he did just that, relating in a few minutes the
whole course of the war, telling me how far United Nations
Forces had driven north in 1950, how far south we had with-
drawn, and how far north we had pushed the second time.
He said that since the last of May 1951 the line had been
relatively stable along the 3 8th parallel. The United Nations
Forces were north of it on the east coast, and North Korean
and Chinese Forces (which he always referred to in the first
person, that is, "our" side or "we") held an approximately
equal amount of territory south of the parallel on the west.

The briefing was quite accurate, the only bias being in
the method of telling, not in the facts, as I verified later.

Burchett said that a Russian spokesman had suggested an
armistice, that Kim II Sung had agreed to discuss it, and that
after a great deal of delay United Nations Forces also had
agreed, sending representatives to meet with those from
North Korea. Then he went into detail about the various
interruptions that ensued, but in each case intimated that the
difficulties were due to the Americans. He also said that the
first meeting place was to have been in Kaesong, but that
American aircraft had violated the truce area, almost ending
the negotiations.

240 General Dean's Story

He said that the two greatest stumbling blocks still re-
maining were the questions of construction of airfields he
thought that would be the toughest because the United States
Air Force would not accede to construction of airfields in
North Korea during the truce, but the People's Republic
needed such fields for peaceful communications within its
boundaries and the prisoner-of-war question. On this he
thought there would be an understanding; but there was
trouble in getting proper lists of names. The Americans, he
said, had submitted a list, but it was unsatisfactory because
it did not give the prisoner's organization or other details
about him. But another list had been promised by December
27, and he felt that a truce would be concluded at that time
if no further incidents occurred. "If," he said, "your Air
Force doesn't violate it and your people are able to prevent
Syngman Rhee from taking some overt action. Syngman
Rhee is dead set against any truce."

He also said, "I'm certain that the American people want
a truce, and that your Army and your Navy want a cease-
fire; but your Air Force and Syngman Rhee do not want
any cease-fire."

He pulled a bottle of Gordon's gin from his pocket. "Well,
that's that/' he said. "Now, I'd like to have your story of how
you were captured. It's pretty warm in here, but ! don't
think a little of this would hurt us."

We had no cups, so the bottle was passed to me. I tried to
pass it on, but they insisted that I take the first drink. I took
a small one and passed the bottle to Burchett. Captain Oh,
and a Chinese photographer, Chun, also drank.

I started to tell him of my experiences from the time I
had left Taejon on the evening of July 20 until I was cap-
tured. Burchett asked me to go slowly. He was taking most

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 241

of it down in longhand, and everything I said had to be
translated by Oh for the others. The whole business took
nearly three hours, and by that time the four of us had
finished the bottle of gin.

Then Burchett said, "I have roughly copied notes on the
letter you sent to your wife yesterday."

I said, "Do you mean to say that letter was turned over to
the newspapers?"

"Well," he said, "I've seen the text."

I said, "Please don't publish those in full. Those letters
were personal, and they contained references to people other
than my own family. I don't want to embarrass others." My
letter had suggested financial aid to some families whom I
believed to be orphaned.

Burchett said, "Well, these letters have been given to the
press, but I won't mention the things that you don't want
mentioned." He scratched out portions of his notes although
when the letters appeared, all over the world, they were car-
ried in full. I believe Burchett was true to his word, but that
Alan Winnington, a correspondent for the London Daily
Worker, whom I did not know at this time, or others published
the full texts. Our own press people picked them up, so Mil-
dred and June read their letters before the originals were
delivered,

We then went to my room, and Burchett asked what ex-
ercises I took. I showed him exercises I would like to have
taken not the fifteen minutes I had been getting. I thought,
"Well, if any of this gets published, perhaps I actually will
get to do some of these things." I could see that the exercises
met with his approval, and the photographer, Chun, took
several pictures of me demonstrating.

When Burchett said, "Do you do any walking?" I an-

242 General Dean's Story

swered, "No. IVe been trying to get regular walks and sun-
baths, and I certainly would like permission for them. But
I'm not even permitted to stand up. The only time I get to
stand is when I go to the latrine/'

He said, Tin certain that is not the will of the Supreme
Command. That's not the policy of the Korean People's Re-
public. There must be some mistake."

I said, u Up until yesterday I wasn't permitted to have a
pencil, and I'm afraid they'll take away the one I have now
not later than tomorrow."

He said, "How is your food?"

I said, "I have no complaint about my food. IVe always
eaten as well as rny guards. And while I have an interpreter
here, Fd like to explain something to them. On November
27 they bought ten eggs, and they gave them to me one at a
time-but the guards had no eggs for themselves. I protested,
but it didn't do any good. Fd like to have the interpreter
explain that I don't want food better than they can get for
themselves."

He made no comment on this, but handed me a book.
"Here's a book I'm leaving for you to read," he said. The
volume was Pastofsky's Selected Short Stories, fiction pieces
mainly concerned with rehabilitation of swamp and desert
areas in the vicinity of the Black and Caspian Seas.

I said, "Don't give me that, Mr. Burchett, because they
won't permit me to have anything to read."

"You may have this book," he said, "because Fve already
secured permission from the commanding general for you to
have it; and I'm certain they won't take your pencil away
from you. I also want you to know that your name went in
on the prisoner-of-war list which was submitted two days

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 243

ago. I've seen news Items telling of your wife's joy."

I said, "Were my son and daughter mentioned?"

"Yes," he said, "your daughter was mentioned, and I under-
stand that she Is with your wife."

I said I was very much concerned about my son Bill, be-
cause I still didn't know whether he'd succeeded In passing
requirements for entering West Point.

Again Burchett nodded. "Fm sure he's in the Academy," he
said. "I have a recollection of a press association item mention-
ing him as being a cadet."

He asked me what I thought about the Korean type of
food, and I said I had reached a point at which I really enjoyed
both rice and kimchee, although I never thought I'd be able
to eat the latter.

Burchett said, "Well, the first thing I'll do when I get
back [to Kaesong or Panmunjom] will be to write a personal
letter to your wife and send it through the newspaper people
on the other side. I'll tell her I've seen you, that you're well,
and that she should learn to cook rice as the Orientals do,
and to make kimchee, so that you'll have the food you desire
when you return."

I told him I appreciated his offer of the letter and hoped
that he would send it, but not to bother about the cooking
Instructions. He did send a letter, and It reached my wife on
her birthday, only two days later.

The interview with Burchett went on until well after
midnight, with none of the other reporters breaking In on
his questioning. Then the photographers went to work, tak-
ing pictures of Burchett and me sitting together on the floor,
of my exercises, and many other poses. They all left a little
before dawn.

244 General Dean's Story

There is one thing I should make absolutely clear at this
point. The final twenty months of my captivity in North
Korea were in sharp contrast to the first sixteen; and I'm
convinced that Burchett, deliberately or otherwise, was prin-
cipally responsible for the change. He is widely known, and
opinions about him vary, but this man made nearly two
years of my life livable, by treating me as a human being
when I was out of the habit of being so treated, and by caus-
ing my North Korean captors to reverse their whole policy
toward me. Food became more plentiful and much better, I
kept the all-important writing materials, mail began to come
through, and the petty restrictions not being able to stand,
not being allowed to lie down in the daytime vanished grad-
ually. I cannot honestly complain about the major points of
my personal treatment after that day. So I don't think it's sur-
prising that I like Burchett and am grateful to him. I'm also
very sorry that he is where he is and sees things as he appar-
ently does. In a couple of subsequent meetings I came to know
a little more about him, but never arrived at any real explana-
tion either for his choice of the Communist side in this war or
for his special kindness to me.

The basic details of his story are simple enough. Burchett
worked for British newspapers prior to World War II, and
as representative of a large London newspaper in the Pacific
War Theater he became known to many American war cor-
respondents, as well as to Army and Navy officers. He worked
almost entirely with United States troops and naval units
and shared correspondents' quarters and privileges at Hono-
lulu, Guam, and many other spots during the westward
progress of that war. His reputation for competence was high,
and newspapermen who worked with him have told me that
they knew of no special political leanings he had at that time.

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 245

But as that war ended the little Australian with the receding
hairline somehow seemed to get out of gear with the free
world. He was in Europe for some years between the wars,
changed employers a time or two, was divorced from his
British wife, then changed sides entirely,

He arrived in Korea during the early part of the North
Korean movement to the south, but sent no dispatches that
aroused world interest until he suddenly appeared with the
Communist negotiators early in the truce talks. From then
on he was used as an unofficial courier and news source on
several special affairs American newsmen's attempts to get
in touch with Frank Noel, an Associated Press photographer
captured while working with the X Corps, messages sent to
me, and other similar matters.

His visit to me was so exciting that I did not think too
much about why he was there. I noticed his use of Communist
terminology "stubbornness of the Americans," "failure of
the United Nations," "Comrade Captain," and his references
to Kim II Sung as the Supreme Commander with built-in
capitals but these were only matters of phraseology. In later
meetings he rarely referred to politics and talked about
American safety razors the blades, he thought, were not as
good as they used to be and about his family. He said his
present wife was a Bohemian girl from one of the "Eastern
People's Democracies"; and in 1953 he told me of the birth
of a son in Peiping. He also spoke often of his former wife and
a fourteen-year-old son, still living in England.

When Captain Oh came to see me the next day he was
all friendliness. He explained that there had been a special
reason for General Lee's visit to me on December 20 that
was Stalin's birthday, and cause for a celebration. But there

246 General Dean's Story

were to be others, specifically, one on my wife's birthday,
December 23, a date I had mentioned in talking to the general.
I had no way of knowing it, but this was the beginning of
a series of celebrations on virtually every conceivable oc-
casion, which continued during the rest of my captivity.

I went from the status of being ignored to the state of
being fetedor celebrated with in one big jump, and I never
quite got used to the idea. Nor can I give any explanation of
why my treatment improved so much, that of other prisoners
very little or not at all. I believe now that I may actually have
been, as my captors claimed, the only American in the ex-
clusive custody of the Koreans, certainly the only one under
that particular administration.

I hate the thought and always will that I was well treated
while others suffered; and there is very little satisfaction in
the fact that I didn't know about it, and could not have
done anything if I had. I should have been able to represent
other prisoners and do something about their treatment; but
I was not able to, and did not. So while the welcome I
received when I finally got home was wonderful and heart-
warming, in some ways it also was a little hard to take. I
wish those other soldiers, thousands of them, could have
shared it much more than they did.

Captain Oh's prospectus of the first celebration on my new
schedule turned out to be a little overenthusiastic. The gen-
eral didn't show up. But Oh did, bringing more fish eggs, both
black and red, and dried devilfish. He and the guards and I
ate it all, and finished the half-pint of sake remaining from
Stalin's celebration.

Incidentally I think I should make myself clear about food
items, in order to avoid being taken for a gourmand. When
I speak of having had fish eggs or meat or fish, I do not mean

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 247

such quantities as we consider normal in the United States.
When an American housewife says, "I'm going to have roast
beef tonight/' she thinks of a roast as four pounds or more,
roughly a pound of meat for each adult. When a Korean
says, "What shall we have for dinner?" the first answer is
always pop (cooked rice); if they're especially hard up, pop
and cho (maize), or pop and susu (millet). There may be
a side dish, such as kimchee or garlic tops, either to put over
the rice or to eat separately, and a small bowl of watery
soup. But kogi (meat) or moor-kogi (fish literally, water
meat) is something special. That's an appetizer, nothing more.
Fish is served in less quantity than you would expect in an
ordinary shrimp salad; meat may be three or four pieces,
each the size of a sugar cube. If beef, it's always grisde; if
pork, fat.

Our diet during early 1952 included one fish normally
used as a fertilizer, something like a very small herring; and
in the spring the real delicacy was the root of the Chinese
bellflower, toiv-raw-gee. About this they even have a song:
"Tow-raw-gee, why do you grow so far up the mountains?"
Occasionally we got tree mushrooms, which I have not identi-
fied in the growing state.

At the December 23 dinner Captain Oh hoped that I had
noticed the improving food. "From now on," he said, "you're
going to have the same food that Korean generals have.
You're to have an egg every day, and you'll get only polished
rice."

I argued with him about this, saying that I preferred the
unpolished variety because it had more food value but he
had a point to worry American dietitians. He said, "No,
that's not true, because polished rice is more palatable. You
therefore eat more of it, which more than compensates for

248 General Dean's Story

the extra food value which might be lost in the polishing/'
I asked him, "Do Korean generals eat better than enlisted

men?"

"Yes," he said, "because they have greater responsibilities.
So they must eat better in order to fulfill those responsibil-

ities.

I said, "Well, that shouldn't apply to a prisoner of war,
because my only responsibility is to keep alive and well and
not to cooperate with my captors."

Nevertheless I got polished rice much of the time there-
after, and eggs from time to time. These were served
raw, broken over a bowl of rice. My interest in them waned
gradually and disappeared almost entirely on the day I broke
one neatly-and out into my rice dropped a fully formed
chicken.

On the evening of December 23 I had a visit from another
journalist, a slightly put-out individual named Liu, who
arrived in some temper over the fact that Burchett had al-
ready interviewed me. Like most of the Oriental press people
who came to see me, he was accompanied by a retinue-
photographers, note bearers, pencil bearers, and just plain
ordinary helperswho listened in to the conversation.

Liu said he represented the "press of the Chinese People's
Republic," so I assumed he was some sort of press-association
man. His attitude was definitely hostile, and I never bothered
to find out much more about him. He was less interested in the
details of my capture, but wanted to know why I was sur-
prised that I had not been cruelly treated by the North
Koreans.

To this loaded question I responded that my answer would
have to depend on what he meant by "cruelly treated/' I
had not been tortured but had been threatened with it, in

My Friend Wilfred Burchett 249

that first month, and my treatment hadn't been exactly gentle
under Colonel Kim's ministrations.

He and Captain Oh, who again was interpreting, brushed
right past that, changing the subject to the old familiar ques-
tion: What hope did Americans think we had of winning?

To annoy him I changed my answer. I said it was just a
matter of time until we'd sweep the Korean peninsula clean.
I said I had not the slightest doubt of that which brought on
a long statement.

This was an easy interview because so much of the time all I
had to do was listen to what the journalist thought, without
bothering to tell him what I thought. This was especially
easy because he had such an unpleasant manner that I resented
what questions he did ask.

The interview closed with my question: Was he related to
the man who had been Chinese (Nationalist) ambassador to
Korea in the pre-war period? This wasn't so much to get
information as to annoy him, which it did.

He said, "No. Unfortunately we have the same name, but
that's like Smith in America. I know Mr. Liu and I'm glad
we're not related, because I would kill him if I could. He's
an enemy of the Chinese People's Republic."

There was one curious aftermath to this interview. I saw
Liu once again, in June 1953, and he was a changed man,
affable, pleasant, soft-spoken, and personable. I think he must
have gone to a male charm school in the meantime.

Burchett's visit and the attention given me by officers of
rank had impressed my guards, who treated me with new
respect thereafter. Captain Oh told me on December 23
that hereafter I could exercise all I wished, and the guards
complied, more or less. I took more calisthenics in the morn-
ings, and, irregularly, was allowed to walk the twelve-yard

250 General Dean's Story

path, screened on both sides, between the house and the
latrine. This was quite steep, with a ten-foot drop in the
twelve yards, and some steps; in this frigid weather it was
also slippery. On the first day that I was allowed to walk
I decided to cover a mile and a half and had it all divided
mentally into the necessary number of round trips. But my
legs weren't equal to it. On the seventy-fourth single trip
they gave out suddenly and I fell, cutting my hand on the
frozen ground. It was only a minor abrasion, but it bled
profusely in the cold air. De Soon Yur was so concerned
about it-insisting that I go inside the house immediately and
wash an extra time that day-that I feared he wouldn't let me
walk again. But things really had changed, and the walking
went on, except when the guards, who hated the cold, refused
to let me. Some days they would not let me go out at all.
Most of them objected to the length of my walks and wanted
to know repeatedly how many trips I had made. I cheated
a little, counting round trips as singles, and thus kept down
the total count their measure of when it was time to go back
inside. By this system I sometimes got in a hundred round
trips. The guard shivered but never bothered to keep count
himself.

On January 2, 1952, 1 had confirmation of the fact that my
family really did know I was alive. Captain Oh brought
copies of three telegrams, dispatched via United Nations
newspaper correspondents, and handed by them to Communist
functionaries at the truce talks, then passed north to me. My
mother had wired, "It's a miracle"; my wife, "It seems like
a dream"; and my daughter, "You have a husky grandson,
born March 24, 1951."

CHAPTER XII

Mail, Gookg, ana Movies

Burchett's visit started a parade of news correspondents to
my little castle on the hillside. The third and to me the most
important was LI Heng Peng, a Chinese, who arrived on
January 16 with twenty-four wonderful letters for me. One
was from uiy wife, written on December 27; two from my
mother; five from friends; two from relatives of former
members of my division who now were listed as missing in
action, asking if I had any word of these men; one from a
cheerful teen-ager who sent me although I did not know
her the latest news on the Davis Cup tennis matches, along
with her good wishes; and the rest from press and radio
representatives, all interested in getting my story. Several of
the correspondents had accompanied the 24th Division in
the early days of the Korean war or were acquaintances from
Japan. This was about the average break-down for mail I
received thereafter, although both the size of the deliveries
and their frequency varied widely. Once afterward I was five
months without mail, and my family went from February
until October of 1952 without hearing directly from me.

Whenever I received mail from relatives of missing soldiers
I forwarded the names to the commandant of POW camps.
I never received any acknowledgment, so have no way of

251

252 General Dean's Story

knowing whether the demands for information even were

delivered.

All told, I received three hundred and eighteen letters and
two magazines, mailed on the United Nations side of the
lines. Both the magazines, received May 10, 1953, curiously
enough, contained definitely anti-Communist articles. Of the
letters I wrote to my family, only about fifteen per cent
were delivered. Anyone watching the way Communist mails
operateor, rather, fail to operate would score this as about
par for the course. Letters simply didn't mean anything to
the people around me; and sometimes they would let their
own letters lie around for a week after writing them. I was
told that an officer had to make a special trip from Pyongyang
to Panmunjom every time I gave them letters to be mailed;
and, northbound, the mail might stall anywhere. Once Captain
Oh rode a bicycle all the way into Pyongyang, at least ten
miles, to get mail for me; and another time De Soon Yur
walked several miles, missing his dinner, so that I could have
mail the same day it arrived in the nearest village. In spite
of the casualness of handling, the Koreans were highly par-
ticular about the mail's appearance. I had to rewrite letters
because my script crossed a red margin on some sheets of
paper, and once my outgoing mail was sent all the way back
from Pyongyang because my homemade envelopes folded
sheets of paper stuck together with rice paste were too un-
tidy for somebody's taste.

Strange things happen to generals. During World War II
I'm a little ashamed to admit this I just ignored the press,
My division had no public information officer, and when war
correspondents visited us I usually tried to arrange a quick
trip to a hot part of the front so they'd go away just as
quickly. The foreign press in Korea, when I was military

Mail, Books, and Movies 253

governor, had been small, so I had little additional contact;
and In the first days of this war I'd been too busy to pay
much attention to the newspapermen.

Now, when my mail started coming through, I was very
much aware of not to say dependent on the correspondents
at Panmunjom, as well as the Communist press men I saw.
These Panmunjom people were my most regular contact with
the outside world, and not only wrote letters of their own
and forwarded messages from my family, but also did their
best to ease the last months of my captivity. One news service
sent through a whole set of photographs of my home and
my wife for me; another provided a very badly needed pen
and pencil set. Robert Tuckman, Howard Handleman, Robert
Vermillion, Dave Cicero, John Rich, and others corre-
spondents all became dependable friends in those months.

LI Heng Peng brought a tape recorder with him, to which
he was very anxious that I should tell my whole story, for
an American radio chain. When I refused, fearing that this
would open the door to all sorts of Communist interviews
and might even be used on the Communist radio, he was
very unhappy. Li may have been a Communist, but you
never saw a capitalist salesman more unhappy at losing a
sale. I often wondered what he had been offered by the
radio people to get that interview, and how they had planned
to make payment.

Incidentally Li was looking after my interests too. He
said, "I'll help you prepare your story. You don't want to tell
too much, or you won't be able to sell your story when you
get back to the United States; but you want to say enough
so that they will know it really is you, and that you're safe."

I told him that I wouldn't make the tape and that I was

254 General Dean's Story

astonished at the publicity already given to me. I said, "I'm
no hero, and the publicity is embarrassing. The sooner it dies
down, the happier I'll be. I'm concerned only that my family
should know that I am alive. I'm ashamed of being a prisoner;
and as far as other people are concerned, I'm sure a two-
headed calf will be born pretty soon, and they'll forget
about me. The sooner, the better."

Li spent a night and a day at the housepartly because
there was an exceptionally heavy air attack, I think by 6-295,
in the Pyongyang area. During that time he assured me that
one of my fears was unjustified. He had just come, he said,
from a POW camp (not identified definitely), and I need
have no worry about the American soldiers there. He said
he had seen Frank Noel, the Associated Press photographer
who was a prisoner, and told me Noel had been awarded a
Pulitzer Prize for photos made in the prison camp. Li said
he himself had been at the camp for some time, living in a
little house nearby, to which prisoners were permitted to
come to use his record player. He also described a Christmas
celebration in which prisoners had exchanged gifts and even
had a Santa Glaus to add some gaiety to the holiday.

I suppose it would have made no difference in any event,
but for some reason I believed Li. He spoke excellent English,
said that both his father and his uncle had been graduated
from the Vanderbilt Medical School, and generally told a
straight story.

As yet I haven't talked to anyone who was at that POW
camp or saw him, so still don't know how much truth there
was in his story, whether the prisoners allowed to go to his
house were the so-called "progressives," or whether the whole
thing was a fabrication. At the time he convinced me. I

Mall, Books, and Movies 255

thought, "My goodness, those lucky devils. My fears were all
groundless. They're having it soft."

I didn't have a chance to find out just how far from the
truth this was until I was freed in 1953.

Li was a pleasant visitor, and he did his best to make him-
self liked. His first gift to me was four American chocolate
bars which the guards enjoyed as much as I did; and he
also presented me with a first issue of an English-language
magazine, China Reconstructs, printed January i, 1952, in
which he had written two of the unsigned articles one
called "Private Enterprise in New China," the other, "Women
in Industry." The magazine was carefully put together, and
the stories had a convincing tone. According to them, the
Chinese People's Republic had already achieved a heaven-
like existence, with everybody happy, everybody well edu-
cated, no beggars, no thieves, and no unemployment. It was
just wonderful. But of course, the editors couldn't let it go
at that. They also had to insert pages vilifying the United
States Americans had exploited the Chinese, were responsible
for most of old China's troubles, had enslaved orphans, ad
infinitum, ad nauseam. The propaganda value, if any, was
dissipated. I can't say I was thoroughly bored reading mat-
ter was at so much of a premium that nothing would have
bored mebut neither was I convinced.

During the next year and a half I acquired quite a
library. Titles in and out of it included this magazine; the
short-story collection Burchett had given me; The History of
the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, which I reread
several times; Anti-Duhring, a text in which Engels restated
and clarified much of Marxist doctrine; two issues of the
magazine Soviet Literature; a book including all of Stalin's

256 General Dean's Story

Orders of the Day, issued on special occasions during World
War II; another text, Stalin as a Military Leader, in which
I discovered that Stalin had invented all the theories of war-
fare which in my abysmal ignorance I formerly had credited
to Hannibal, Napoleon, or von Moltke, but which, to be
honest, also included some very straight thinking about mod-
ern campaigning. If Stalin actually was the father of these
ideas about directing campaigns through territory where the
civil population was friendly, as this book claimed, my respect
for him as a military leader was increased, in spite of the book's
absurdities.

Other titles included Stalin's own Lessons in Leninism;
Gentlemen of Japan, by Havens; Dollar Diploinacy, pub-
lished in 1925; Jack London's Love of Life; copies of Masses
and Mainstream, an American Communist periodical; a British
Labour party paper so dull that I couldn't read it, starved as
I was for reading; and various copies of the London Daily
Worker not so dull, but guaranteed to make you mad at
least twice on every page, although from it I could glean
a little world news under the propaganda. The non-propa-
ganda reading matter came from Burchett and the rest from
Captain Oh. Much of the Communist doctrine was heavy
going, but I'm glad I read all of it. At least I know now what
theories we're fighting, as well as what men.

Li also presented me with his own blank notebook, ap-
parently issued by the Chinese Army for an expense account
record, which I used frequently and still have. And as the
crowning gift he produced a bottle of American bourbon.
I don't know what small bit of information had led to the
idea that I was an alcoholic, but from the time Burchett
visited rne every Communist who wished to be nice to me
produced a bottle of something to drink. At various times

Mall, Books, and Movies 257

I had gin, U. S. bourbon, Canadian bourbon, and almost end-
less gifts of sake, ginseng, and vodka.

Li asked me whether my treatment in prison had always
been kind, and I told him, "No. It's becoming more consider-
ate all the time, and since Mr. Burchett's visit it has become
exceedingly kind but that's a one~hundred-and-eighty-de-
gree turn from what it was before. During the interrogation
in September of last year It was a little tough." I repeated to
him a story told to me by a Hollander who had been captured
in the Dutch East Indies. The man had told me he never
had things really bad until Koreans became his guards. He
had said, "They're sadistic."

Captain Oh was around during Li's stay not to Interpret,
but perhaps just to listen in on what we said to each other.
He overheard part of this and really jumped me for saying
it.

For once, I argued with him. I said, "Well, it's true. Maybe
you can defend yourselves by saying that you were so fear-
ful of the Japanese that you overdid your job to prove your
faithfulness to your masters. But regardless of the reason,
I've heard from many former prisoners that their Korean
guards were more cruel than the Japanese as much as you
hate the Japanese."

Oh finally admitted this was true but tried to make a
point that the Koreans are not naturally cruel. He said, "The
Koreans aren't naturally cruel. They're kind and humane
at heart."

Well, that was his opinion.

Perhaps the talk did have some effect. Li had brought
along a photographer, and on the second day of his visit
wanted photos of me playing chong-gun and getting my out-
door exercise. The guards produced a chong-gun board, and

258 General Dean's Story

I thought this might mean the beginning of more play for me,

but it was taken away immediately afterward.

When the outdoor pictures were being taken I stumbled
and staggered as I walked up and down that steep path.
Captain Oh said, "What's the matter with you? You're
awfully weak. Aren't you getting your walking daily?"

I told him that it had been sporadic. "One day they'll let
me walk the round-trip a hundred times, and then they'll
miss for several days."

Immediately he jumped on the guards, spouting Korean
at them in a stream and thereafter I had no more trouble. I
usually got in about three miles a day, up and down that path.

After Li's visit my social life settled down, except for
special celebrations. Li had refused to drink any of the whisky
he brought, so I saved it and told Oh who apparently was
in charge of me now to come by, and we'd have a drink
before dinner.

I had some education still coming mainly about drinking.
Oh appeared a night or so later, bringing a large Chinese
cup and his idea of a small drink before dinner was to see
how rapidly we could drink the bottle. This was true of any
state occasion, and obviously this evening was such a cele-
brationthe occasion being that we had a bottle to drink.
We celebrated the end of Old Bourbon, finishing him off
in quick order.

The next occasion came in February. Tal, the civilian
interpreter, showed up on the sixth, bringing twenty-four
more wonderful letters, including word from my wife and
my daughter and letters from Clarke and Bissett, each of
whom assured me I could quit worrying he was not dead.

Two days later Tal was back, this time to join me in
celebrating Inmun Gun Day, the anniversary of the formation

Mall, Books, and Movies 259

of the North Korean Army, with the help of a bottle of sake.
This called for toasts. The guards, Tal, and I drank toasts
like crazy. Mine was, "May the Inmun Gun never fight again
and may it suffer no defeats other than at the hands of the
United States." Even though this was translated (I have no
way of telling how well), they drank to it cheerfully. At
other parties I proposed toasts to the early victory of the
United Nations, and my Communist guards drank them down.
So, though I may have lifted my glass to some strange things
in Korean, at least we were even.

Often sake or vodka just appeared, with special food but
no other guests, and it became obvious that these parries
were to be regular affairs. I began a campaign to try to get
somebody drunk preferably the guards. I thought if I ever
succeeded, that would be a fine time to take off for the
south but I never did. De Soon Yur claimed that liquor made
him ill and never drank, and the guard on duty always
limited himself to a single small glass of sake.

The only success I had was with one small fellow, a new
guard who had just replaced somebody who had gone off to
officers' school or had been discharged. Almost all my guards
were husky types, but this one was a thin, long-haired little
character, slightly on the pasty-faced side. At this celebration
he was the one delegated to drink with me, while the others
stayed sober. The liquor was sake, and the supply far too
plentiful for my liking. But by this time I had discovered
that the proper thing was for me to do the pouring. Thus
I could get two or three drinks into a guard while taking
only one myself.

I poured this fellow a glass, and to my delight he drank it
straight down. I thought, "Oh-oh, I've found one Korean
with a hollow leg. We'll just see . . ."

260 General Dean's Story

I poured another, and he drank It just as fast. A third glass
also went down at full speed.

In about fifteen minutes I was extremely sorry. When I
had been in the Requirements Division of the Ground Forces,
in Washington, D. C, one of our jobs had been the prepara-
tion of training manuals. We tried very hard to write a
manual to fit almost every military situation. But there in
Korea I realized how badly we had failed. To my knowledge,
there is no U. S. Army manual that says what to do when
having drinks with a Korean sergeant who gets drank easily,
then turns queer as a three-dollar bill and tries to hug and
kiss you.

What I did do was to pour him two or three more drinks,
just as fast as possible while dodging. Then he passed out,
fortunately, and I poured the rest of the sake through a
crack in the floor.

On April 5 Alan Winnington, the only Caucasian besides
Burchett to whom I talked in three years, appeared in the
early morning. He was pleasant, but the interview was not
a great success. He was suffering acutely from dysentery,
which was still plaguing me too. Again photographs were
taken; and again props were brought in this time a rough
wooden bench on which to sit. I enjoyed every minute of
this sitting, not having seen anything resembling a chair for
a year and a half; but as soon as the photos were finished the
bench was taken away, and I saw no more Western-style
furniture until the middle of 1953.

Wilmington interested me less than Burchett, perhaps for
the selfish reason that he did nothing about my situation ex-
cept bring another bottle of whisky, which I really didn't
want. But like Burchett, he did a straight reporting job and
tried to sell me no propaganda. He didn't explain how a

Mail, Books, and Movies 261

British national came to be operating with Communist troops.

Earlier, International News Photos had sent through Pan-
munjom a set of twenty-seven photos of my wife and the
house she had just bought in Berkeley. Since we had never
owned a home before, I naturally was tremendously inter-
ested and spent hours trying to figure out a floor plan from
the pictures, and to identify such objects as a square chest
in the living room. This I had to assume was a television set,
although I'd never seen one.

The guards also were vitally interested, especially in one
of Mildred leaning against the TV set, with a figurine of a
Japanese fisherman visible on a shelf behind her. They wanted
to know her age and obviously thought I was lying when I
traitorously told them how old she wasbut most of all they
wanted to know, "Who is the fisherman?" Various sug-
gestions were made a household god, a national hero. The
idea of having a statuette just for decoration was too much
for our two languages without translation. I finally said,
"HarabacbieF'litzrally, my grandfather and everybody was
satisfied. Incidentally, those pictures did more to impress my
guards than anything else. When they saw how big my jeep
(house) was, they thought I must, after all, be somebody of
importance.

In May we moved across the valley to a more traditional
Korean structure about the same size as the hillside house,
but one which Captain Oh claimed would be less damp. For
me, this move meant principally a larger spot in which to
do my daily walking, and the added interest of Chinese
troops manning positions nearby. They indulged in song
sessions and competed with the Koreans in trying to get
interrogation teams to downed United Nations fliers first.
But for the guards the move meant more walking to get

262 General Dean's Story

their food. After having to cross the valley all winter to an

old mess hall, they had just acquired a new food facility a

few yards from the hillside house. Now they had to cross

the valley, the other way, to eat and bring back my food to

me.

We spent a rather lazy summer. In mid- June, Oh insisted
that I needed a record-player and subsequently produced an
old American wind-up phonograph, even though I said I
wasn't especially interested. It was a real relic, and the ten rec-
ords that came with it were worn almost smooth perhaps
because the guards resharpened the needle by rubbing it on a
rock. One record had "Camptown Races" on one side and
"My Old Kentucky Home" on the other; two Hawaiian
pieces were on another record; and the rest were mostly
Korean songs.

I could have done without this entirely, but De Soon Yur
liked it a lot. He was the one who always wound and
operated it, playing "Old Kentucky Home" first, then the
Korean numbers he really wished to hear and learn.

I decided once to play the machine myself, but the guard
on duty complained violently, saying "De" several times.
I think De Soon Yur probably had told them that no one else
was to play it, in order to avoid having it going all the time.

I hadn't really cared before, but this annoyed me. When
Captain Oh showed up again I demanded, "Who is this
record-player for, De or me?"

He said, "You," and I explained that I wasn't allowed to
play it. Oh thereupon made it loudly clear to everybody
that this was my machine and I could play it when I liked.

But I can be ornery too. After I got permission I never
played that thing again.

The only other real breaks in the summer were three movie

Mail, Books, and Movies 263

showings especially arranged for me in a newly built "cultural
hall" near the old hillside house. These were The Fall of
Berlin, a fictionalized account of Russian World War II
heroism; The International Youth Congress, a documentary
that spent much of its footage on certain American youths
talking about the decline of capitalism and about world
peace under the leadership of the Soviet; and a film cele-
brating the anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People's
Army over the Nationalists. This featured a lot of battles
which seemed to consist mostly of mass charges, and a Peiping
parade which consisted entirely of American trucks, tanks,
and howitzers, now in the possession of the Communists. I
can't speak authoritatively about the endings of any of these
movies because in no instance did the electric power hold
out for the full showing. That was a busy summer for our
bombers, and the North Korean power system just wasn't
up to par.

At one of the showings Major Kim went along with
Captain Oh and me, and afterward came to the house for
another celebration. He himself had very little to celebrate.
His family had been living near the east coast in an area
overrun by South Korean troops. His six-year-old son, meet-
ing the newcomers, happily told them that his father too was
a soldier, then just as happily led them to his home when
they expressed interest. Kim's wife, who had just joined him
this summer, was now a bed-ridden cripple, and her parents
were dead. But Kim remained friendly to me and only
shrugged at his family's misfortune. He said, "That is war,"
and then no more about it.

In the winter of 1951-52 my ear had become infected and
had started to drain. The guards had brought in a very young
Army doctor, who put some gauze in my ear and, I thought,

264 General Dean's Story

took it all out again at the same time he was shooting me
in the hip with some penicillin that De had obtained. Me
left what was undoubtedly the dullest hypodermic needle
in the world, and De continued to give me a shot every three
hours until I neither could sit down nor move my arms with-
out extreme pain. Nor was I made much happier by the rudi-
mentary sterilization of the needle or the fact that the
penicillin was mixed with ordinary drinking water from the
household bucket. That penicillin, it seemed to me, lasted
forever.

When the ear started to drain again I didn't let the guards
know about it, for fear of getting more treatment. In Tokyo
in the autumn of 1953, an Army ear specialist removed from
my ear some of the gauze that had been put into itand
overlooked in December 1951. He said I was lucky still to
have an ear, and I believe him.

But in the summer of 1952 this same doctor was called
again when I developed an infected eye. He was willing to
step aside and I was willing to have him do so when Captain
Oh brought a civilian eye specialist from Pyongyang. He
cured the infection promptly, but had to be dissuaded from
operating on me to remove a ptyergium. He assured me that
he was the best eye specialist in the Orient and had removed
many such growths, but I finally managed to convince him I
could get along with it just dandy until I got back to the
United States. This has been removed since my return, and I
still have my eyesight. But for a while there in 1952 I wouldn't
have given much for my chances of keeping it.

My personal company had changed frequently during the
previous months, but I came to know some of the men well
De Han Gool had lived in Kaesong when American troops
had an outpost there in the prewar days and delighted in

Mail, Books, and Movies 265

telling me about his contacts with them. He eventually went
on to school and received a commission.

Kong, the tubercular, was discharged for health reasons,
as was Um, a guard I never had liked. Pack went on to a
commission, as did nearly every other member of the guard
who stayed in the Army. I felt like a prep school for officers'
training. De Soon Yur was the exception, and I was told
by Captain Oh that he had refused to go, preferring to stay
with me.

The habits of a lifetime are hard to break, and that was
a summer when I was both bored and unsanguine. I had
no real faith that there would be either an early peace or
an exchange of prisoners, and reading material was short. I
was badly in need of something to do, so I tried to make an
officer out of De Soon Yur. I gave him any number of sales
talks, which may or may not have been effective, considering
the few words we knew of each other's language. When he
was due to make a trip to Pyongyang, I'd encourage him to
shine the buttons on his uniform. This helped his appearance
and pleased him mightily.

About the same timeI must be vague on details about
this and a few other matters in order to avoid hurting people
who helped me in North Korea and still are there I began
to get suggestions that perhaps I was in the wrong army any-
how. It was a long campaign, which started with happy
little thoughts that I should write to congressmen, telling them
to have the war stopped, then shifted to my own responsibil-
ities. The gist of these veiled hints was: "A man of your
talents shouldn't be wasting his time as a prisoner. You
should do something for mankind and become a true interna-
tionalist. If you're interested, it wouldn't be at all difficult.
You could have a division in the Inmun Gun, or perhaps even

266 General Dean's Story

command a corps. Or, if you're weary of fighting, perhaps
a political position. Song Ho (whom I had known as head
of the South Korean constabulary) has already had his gen-
eral's stars pinned on by Kim II Sung himself. You could
have the same and your family could live comfortably in
Peiping, where life is very good, and you could see them
often." I can't be more specific than this, but I'm convinced
that the repeated offer had some substantial basis but of
course, I had to go and spoil it. When somebody asked me
what I intended to do for the sake of peace when I got home,
I said, "I'll try to build up the military unit to which I am
assigned in such a manner that it will impress any would-be
aggressors." I don't think that's what my questioner had in
mind; after that, not too much more was said to me about a
corps in the Communist Army.

I had another attack of malaria early that summer, and it
left me weak and debilitated. Shortly after the attack we
walked one night to see one of the three movies I mentioned,
and I found I had night blindness. I tripped in the smallest
holes and fell down a couple of times. But I didn't fall far.
Guards walking with nie held my arms, to my considerable
annoyance although Captain Oh said they were just hanging
on to support me. But I had a feeling they thought I might
take off in the dark if I ever got a chance. Even more annoy-
ing was the fact that on another trip to the movies this in
a jeep a guard held on to me all through the ride. Again the
story relayed by Oh was that they were afraid I would fall
out. I told him that, after all, I had ridden in a jeep a few
times before and knew how to hang on, but the guard's clutch
wasn't relaxed until we were safely in the cultural hall.

Except for bombing, the war was not bothering the people
around me that summer. Food continued to improve, for me

Mail, Books, and Movies 267

and for my guards, and everyone seemed relaxed. On May i
my guards except the duty man went off to a big celebra-
tion in Pyongyang. De Han Gool was in some sort of a show,
wearing a fake beard; Pak (the little one) played in a soccer
match; and Big Pak, a newcomer who had been a guerrilla in
South Korea before the war, got to wrestle. I was told there
was also a huge political meeting in an underground audi-
torium, which would seat three thousand people, near Lib-
eration Park.

The wives of two of the guards one of them somehow
having made her way from South Koreamoved into the
little house near ours and immediately started making a gar-
den and fixing up the shanty. The two husbands helped occa-
sionally; and at least once took their wives for an evening
walk a rare treat for a Korean woman but succeeded only
in getting themselves picked up by a Chinese patrol because
they were wearing only bits and pieces of uniforms. The two
women were released by the Chinese, but Captain Oh had to
make a major effort to get the two men freed. The Chinese
were sure they were infiltrators or spies.

I asked De Soon Yur, "Why don't you bring your wife up
here from Haeju, like the others?"

He said, "I have no wife.' 7 She had been killed months
before in a direct hit on an air-raid shelter, but he had not
bothered to mention the loss to me.

One thing about that summer I definitely didn't like. It
looked to me as if United Nations planes had lost daylight
control of the air over Pyongyang. I saw Communist jets
overhead more than I saw our own, and there were quite a
number of high-altitude dogfights. Once in August I saw one
of our own planes knocked down, while the Koreans around
me cheered. On another day United Nations aircraft made a

2 68 General Dean's Story

major effort, aiming a terrific attack on Pyongyang. The
bombersfour or five hundred of them, I think came hour
after hour, and explosions in Pyongyang were practically
continuous. A regular umbrella of our jets stayed overhead,
and there was no question about control of the air. I heard no
cheering except what I was doing, quietly, myself.

The celebrations continued on every conceivable occasion.
We celebrated my birthday, August i , my wedding anniver-
sary (and the anniversary of my capture), August 25; Korean
Thanksgiving in October; then American Thanksgiving. It
was getting so that I dreaded the sight of another bottle of
Bulgarian vodka or sake.

In the autumn Captain Oh had an idea that attracted me
more than the offers of Communist commands. It was going
to be a cold winter, he said, and we should try to go to China.
As a matter of fact, he was quite sure that if I made such a re-
quest it would be acted upon favorably and Oh might get to
go, as well as a guard of my choice.

This was a continuous pressure, which began in September
and kept up. Oh said, "Wouldn't you like to see with your
own eyes that what that magazine, China Reconstructs, told
you was true? I know you haven't been to China yourself,
but your friends have told you about the poverty, the beg-
gars, and the great distress. Just from what you've heard from
your own friends, not from us, and what you'll see with your
own eyes, you'll find that all of this reconstruction story
is true. You'll realize what the People's government has
done."

I said, "Look, I'm a prisoner of war. I'd be a lame-brain,
suggesting that I go there as a tourist."

But Oh continued to be positive that I would get a favor-
able reaction. He continued to tell me about how much he

Mail, Books, and Movies 269

wanted to go to China himself. He had been there before and
always had wanted to go back.

All that summer Oh visited me regularly, sometimes to test
his English by reading passages from a book, Gentlemen of
Japan, and having me correct his pronunciation, sometimes
with a few guarded questions, but just as often with surpris-
ing information. From him I learned exactly how many men
a B-29 carried, where each of them sat in the plane, and what
his duties were. These people had some things about us down
to a gnat's eyebroweven some of our intramural arguments.
Several times I was told that there was a disagreement within
our Services about bombing the Navy wanted nothing but
strategical targets, the Air Force was willing to go along with
ground troops by providing some close support, but the Army
always was left out, in the end, on what it wanted the Air to
do. The number of things referred to me was amazing, appar-
ently after having been elicited from others or picked up
from our own radio or press. Usually it was patent that all
they wanted from me was some sort of confirmation, and I
developed a fool-proof defense. Fd express surprise and ask
for more details. I found out that if you acted surprised and
dumb, they filled in your dumbness. Sometimes I learned
quite a lot, without saying anything. The one thing I did not
learn was that peace talks had begun on July 10.

Most of the time Captain Oh was trying to make things
better for me, and I was grateful to him. So when this pres-
sure about going to China kept up, I finally had a weak mo-
mentanother of those times when my sympathy worked
against me, and I also thought I was being clever. I thought,
"Well, he wants to go so much, and it can't hurt me. If I
could really get to China, boy, I'll certainly be able to escape."

I remembered from military government days that Koreans

270 General Dean's Story

in whom I had confidence always said, "If you want to get
something from a Japanese, you scold him; if you want some-
thing from a Korean, you praise him; and if you want some-
thing from a Chinese, you bribe him." I thought, "Well, if
we get down there, at least the people around us will have
been exposed to American dollars enough to know what I'm
talking about when I promise them pay. Maybe I can bribe
my way right out of this mess."

I told Oh, U A11 right, I'll ask to go to China."

So I made the request. I immediately regretted having
made it, and did not feel bad when it was turned down.

By October, when no great United Nations offensive had
developed, I figured there was no point in trying to escape
just then. There's nothing to eat in the North Korean hills
at that season, and I figured I would have to spend about
another thirty-five days on any escape attempt. I thought,
"Well, again I'll have to wait until spring. About March 15
the offensive will surely come."

In the meantime I began working on a biography of Kim
II Sung. Other captured people may have had occupations
even more odd, but that one of mine should be up somewhere
among the strangest.

Again Captain Oh was responsible. He explained that he
wanted to translate the biography, a thin Korean volume, into
English for his own amusement. He would translate a page
or two and bring it to me. I'd correct the English usually
just substituting more suitable language for the literal trans-
lationsand he'd take it back and type it. It was slow work
but did give me some idea about the North Korean leader,
an almost mythological creature, whose age even has been
disputed widely.

According to the biography, he now is only a little over

Mail, Books, and Movies 2 7 1

forty. His father had been a Korean revolutionary, jailed by
the Japanese when the son was about twelve years old. When
the father finally was released, his health broken by his prison
treatment, the family went across the Chinese border, where
the father died. As a high-school boy, Kim II Sung joined
the youth division of the Communist party and was put in
jail himself. When he got out he organized a guerrilla move-
ment against the Japanese, operating from beyond the Yahi
and making sporadic raids to kill Japanese garrisons, then
running back into the hills.

But, said the book, he always had Communist textbooks
and political Instructors with his guerrillas. When the Jap-
anese surrendered, he took over the local area, where the
Russians found him in charge and practically deified by the
Koreans. Because he was a disciple of Marx, the Soviets gave
him their blessing, and thus he was on his way to control of
the country, taking along as national leaders many of the
guerrillas who had joined him as youngsters.

Unfortunately I never finished this book. Oh told me one
day that a friend of his had been officially commissioned to do
a translation of the same volume and had it finished. There-
after his interest lagged, and I saw no more pages. I think Oh
had hoped to gain a promotion or notice by doing this job
on his own, but the other fellow beat him to It.

We never got to China, but in February 1953 we went
north again, to Kanggye. We had followed this same route
twenty-eight months earlier, but now no fleeing army went
with us. I was told the move was made to avoid expected
heavy bombing, but I thought more likely it was to get me
out of the way of that United Nations offensive which I still
expected on March 15.

I now was definitely getting privileges of rank, and the

272 General Dean's Story

privileges consisted of one elderly American sedan, straight
off a dead-line (out-of -repair area) in Pyongyang, and com-
plete with the usual non-working starter and driver-with-
peculiarities. This fellow's special belief was that lie would
lose face by shifting gears while going uphill and the road to
Kanggye goes over numerous mountains. Again and again and
again, he let the engine lug until it died, then sat pleasantly
behind the wheel while the huskiest of the guards wound the
engine by hand. Sometimes it would start in half an hour,
sometimes in two hours, and sometimes not at all and the tem-
perature was six below zero. We pushed the car into one
village; were finally helped by drivers from a Chinese convoy
in another two-hour emergency (our driver always managed
to block the road when he killed the engine); and in a third
crisis were pulled over a mountain pass by a truck.

When I wasn't wondering how soon we'd all freeze to
death, I had my first real chance to see what the bombers had
done while I was listening to them during the last two years.

For one thing, the railroads had been smashed but repaired.
I think no important bridge between Pyongyang and Kang-
gye had been missed; and most of the towns were just rubble
or snowy open spaces, where buildings had been. It gladdened
my heart to see how much damage actually had been done
but I also noticed the countermeasures. For every bridge the
Communists thought might be hit by our Air, another bridge
was waiting, cached nearby against the day when they'd have
to rebuild it quickly. I don't mean just piles of material. There
were whole bridge sections all ready to be slipped into
place. Sometimes duplicate highway bridges had already been
thrown across the streams, so that a bomber would have to
get both of them in order to stop traffic. The little towns,
once full of people, were unoccupied shells. The villagers lived

Mail, Books, and Movies 273

in entirely new temporary villages, hidden in canyons or in
such positions that only a major bombing effort could reach
them.

These people had been hurt by bombing and still were being
hurt by it, but it looked to me as if their countermeasures
were improving faster than our measures of destruction.

CHAPTER XIII

The J^ong f Long East

At Kunu-ri, which had been close to the hlghwater mark
of our invasion of North Korea, but now consisted mostly of
dugouts, we were fed in a state restaurant, one of the Com-
munist innovations. As nearly as I could figure, the quite
decent meal was free, except that if the traveler wanted meat
in his soup he had to pay fifty ton, equivalent to a cent or two
in our money but more than a North Korean sergeant's basic
daily pay. But perhaps this is an unfair comparison, because
pay scales and food costs have very little relationship. These
same sergeants were drawing five hundred ton daily as food
ration money, and more for me.

The entrenchments from the battle of Kunu-ri were still
visible, and some old men told us they had been there and
had seen American wounded in a hospital burned to death
during that bitter fight.

Highway traffic was controlled by flagmen every two
kilometers, and came to a dead stop whenever airplanes were
over us. But when our stalled sedan held up a whole Chinese
convoy of about fifty trucks, no planes happened to be near,
in spite of my prayers for a quick air attack.

The town of Huichon amazed me. The city Fd seen before
two-storied buildings, a prominent main street wasn't there
any more. If it hadn't been for the river crossing I would not

274

The Long, Long Last Days 275

have believed this could be the same place. What few people
remained lived in dugouts, and what had been a city was
snow-covered fields.

We spent that night at a private house in a village some
twenty miles to the north, sharing it with a woman and her
half -grown daughter. In the morning the husband, who had
been away on a trip, returned. He showed no surprise what-
ever at finding his home occupied by four members of the
Inmun Gun, plus a strange-looking American. I suppose he
must have been used to it.

This was February 8, another holiday, the Inmun Gun an-
niversary. We spent the morning watching schoolchildren in
the village put on songs and dances, while our driver worked
on the tired sedan. He got it fixed at long last by soaking
rags in gasoline, then throwing them on top of the car's en-
gine to get it warm enough to start. Another of his habits w^s
to fill the gasoline tank from an open bucket while smoking a
cigarette. Why he didn't blow himself and the sedan up I'll
never know.

Days later we reached Kanggye and were billeted in an
excellent Korean house, on the side of a mountain about a
thousand feet above the valley floor.

Here we lived as comfortably as anyone in North Korea
does during winter and early spring. During my afternoon
walks outdoors I noticed more and more U. S. planes, usually
jets operating at high altitudes, without the obvious Com-
munist aerial opposition that had disturbed me during the
summer. I followed them with a good deal of satisfaction-
and the guards watched them for bacteriological bombs. My
worm's-eye view of this phase of the war may have no im-
portance, but it was interesting. So far as I was concerned, the
North Koreans had started their great defensive campaign

276 General Dean's Story

against these nonexistent bacteriological attacks with a vigor-
ous national inoculation campaign in February 1952. Every-
body-soldiers, civilians, adults, and children-received four
separate inoculations and revaccination. They were monster
shots, and all of North Korea had fever and sore arms. Even
I got one shot, which made my arm swell more and created a
harder lump than any of the hundreds of shots I've received
in our own Army. Captain Oh explained that this was a "com-
bination shot," to combat various diseases. At the time there
seemed to be no special reason for the campaign, but the mys-
tery cleared up in May 1952, when I was shown alleged
statements by American fliers confessing to the dropping of
germ bombs.

Oh prefaced this evidence by saying, "I know you won't
believe it when I tell you that your Army is engaging in
bacteriological warfare." But, he said, he actually had talked
to pilots who admitted dropping the bombs; and later he
brought me a Korean newspaper with a photostatic copy of
an alleged confession, hand-written by a U. S. pilot who
described his training for the mission, the special low-level
attack, and all the details.

I tossed it back to Oh. I said, "I'm not convinced. While
this may be the handwriting of the officer whose signature
appears there, the phraseology is not that of an American. lie
may have written it and signed it under duress. It sounds like
a dictated statement. I have never heard a fellow American
say that he was 'a slave of Wall Street.' And that expression
of sorrow is the same phraseology I've read time and time
again in alleged confessions of others. That's a pattern. The
officer may have signed that statement, but I wonder how
much he was tortured before he signed itand I wonder who
dictated it."

The Long, Long Last Days 277

Oh said, "I knew you wouldn't believe it. You won't be-
lieve anything. But in your heart you must know It's true.
What do you mean by torture? Are we torturing you?"

I said, "No, I've never been tortured, but I continue to
worry about officers and men of lesser rank. That's why I still
want to go to a POW camp."

He said, "Stop worrying about your men. They're better
off than you are. They're all being taken care of by the
Chinese. You're the only foreign prisoner of war still in cus-
tody of the Koreans."

He continued to talk about germ bombs, so I finally said,
"What makes you think these are germ bombs, outside of
some photos of flies crawling on the snow, which don't prove
a thing? Has there been any more cholera, typhoid or malaria
any more than usual?"

He said, "No, but only because of our careful precautions.
We had national inoculation of the population. Nobody
could move on the roads without an inoculation card, We
were ready for the germ bombs when they came."

The whole thing began to make some sense from a propa-
ganda viewpoint: first, they inoculated the population (with
what really didn't make much difference), then announced
that germ bombs were being dropped by an Inhuman enemy
(the United Nations) . They were able to whip up the national
will to fight and a first-class hate campaign without the ne-
cessity of proving the bombing. A few carefully planted flies
and some bomb fragments were enough to convince even
people like Captain Oh that germ bombs actually had been
dropped. I'm sure he still believes it. It was undoubtedly a big
hoax, dictated from above. But man, it was sold to the people.
"We've got to get together. We're fighting inhuman so-
and-sos, who know no limits. We must all fight harder"

278 General Dean's Story

that's the line they were talking about and thinking about,
selling to each other. And it worked. Korea has always been
plagued by a strange and awesome variety of diseasesmalaria,
typhoid, encephalitis, cholera, dysentery. But this hate cam-
paign succeeded in convincing the North Koreans that all
these were the fault of the Americans.

The civil population became so inflamed that a downed
airman had virtually no chance of getting away from his
wrecked plane or parachute. Although Chinese and Korean
intelligence officers always raced each other for downed air-
men, most of the captures were made by farmers or villagers
long before the military arrived.

Perhaps a digression is worth while at this point on the
subject of propaganda. I was interested during these years to
hear what the Communists said about us how they argued
their people into the idea that the American way was one of
aggression, brutality, and exploitation of friendly peoples.

The one thing obvious from the first was that they were
watching all the time for any sign of weakness, any scrap of
information, true, half -true, or not-quite-false, which could
be ballooned into "evidence" of American wrongdoing, the
failure of capitalism, or the sad condition of little people liv-
ing under U. S. rule.

Racial prejudice was their principal stock in trade. Every
captured Negro soldier or officer was subjected to extra pres-
sure. "Why should you fight for a country that treats your
people so badly at home?" was the question they hammered
at these men.

Every time they got hold of a bit of evidence (or alleged
evidence) of racial discrimination, especially from Negro
prisoners, it was brought to me always with the query,
"What is your conclusion?"

The Long, Long Last Days 279

Usually I either had no conclusion or told them that I
would not believe their particular story until I had reliable
evidence of its truth.

Another weapon is their claim that capitalism is wasteful,
an important point in a country like Korea, where everything
is infinitely more precious than in the United States. Their
pet phrase was "the anarchy of capitalist production," an ac-
cusation based on the argument that capitalism has no planning
in its production, suffers from excesses, huge inventories, and
overproduction, or from false scarcities. Such an incident as
the burning of coffee in Brazil to hold the price level, or the
destruction of government-owned potatoes in the United
States, is hauled out as general evidence of a condition which
naturally, in this light, looks horrible to a people near starva-
tion.

Another point is that through their labor unions American
workers complain about and fight against labor-saving de-
vices, because they put men out of work. Under communism,
runs the theme, everyone tries to devise labor-saving equip-
ment because there will be work for all at all times. In the
beginning everyone will have to work harder than he would
like, and long hours, but it will all come out right in the end,
with everyone's labor planned, no duplication, no human
being working for an individual rather than for society as a
whole. Then there won't be excessive hours of labor, and each
will receive his requirements.

I repeat these highly colored claims because I believe we
must understand how the Communist argues. My special
point is for anyone who may come up against Communist
argument, as a prisoner or otherwise. These are the things you
will be told, so have your answers ready.

At Kanggye we began playing chong-gun regularly again.

280 General Dean's Story

There had been one false start In 1952, which had ended in an
argument when I objected to kibitzing tactics. De, in anger,
had burned up the chong-gun board. This put me in a position
of not being able to suggest the game again, with dignity. I
waited until De himself suggested that we resume playing.
This he did in March 1953, and the game became our prin-
cipal method of passing time.

I improved some and began working up through the chong-
gun ranks beating first the poorest player, then challenging
the next, and so on. At first most of the guards gave me a
handicap, and I'd be elated when each one would admit by
withdrawing the handicap that I was getting into his class.
I finally succeeded even in beating De Soon Yur a few times,
and frequently made him resort to his special form of minor
cheating. When he did this I figured I had arrived as a chong-
gun player.

All cooks in North Korea apparently are known as Asi-
monie (literally, auntie). The one we acquired at Kanggye
was a twenty-two-year-old widow, whose husband had been
killed by South Korean police at Kaesong in 1949. She and
her three-year-old daughter, a whiny child, moved in with us
on the mountain. Myungja was such a spoiled youngster that
I lost interest in trying to make friends with her during those
first weeks when the cold was intense and the snow deep.
Within a short time a softer windwhat we'd call a chinook
in the western part of the United States hit, and the sun came
out. I began taking sunbaths outside, which also gave me a
better light for hunting the cooties with which the house was
infested. Occasionally I would read, while Myungja played
around the kitchen door.

On one such sunny afternoon, while I was deep in some
Communist tome, the child approached me and, saying noth-

The Long, Long Last Days 281

Ing, extended a gift toward me. I took it without looking.
From the circumstances and the texture of the goodie, I
assumed it was dough, the ground-rice cake I have men-
tioned before, and which Asi-monie frequently steamed be-
tween meals. I put it into my mouth and had eaten about half
of it before I realized that even Asi-monie could not have
managed to get so much grit into a rice ball.

It was a mud pie, gift of the daughter (now watching me
with fascinated eyes) rather than the mother. I prefer not to
think of the condition of the soil from which it was manu-
facturedbut my only suffering was mental

Asi-monie also restored my faith that Koreans do have ordi-
nary human emotions, even during a war, I had noticed as
soon as we settled down that one of the guards, Sohn, a
young widower, did many things for the cook, even carrying
water for her, which was an unheard-of courtesy. And before
we left the story was complete. A curtain was strung up to
divide the guards' sleeping room, and Sohn thereafter slept
behind the curtain with Asi-monie and Myungja. I suppose I
was witnessing the start of a new Korean household.

I had a couple of other diet difficulties in Kanggye, which
show, I suppose, that Americans remain squeamish to the
bitter end. Once, on a walk, a guard discovered a rabbit, dead
and frozen in the trail. The rabbit had a snare mark on its
neck, so the guards were sure it was perfectly all right and
cooked it promptly. They thought I was weak-stomached
when I turned down iny portion.

Also, there was a matter of a large dog, somewhat like a
chow, that followed a half -grown girl around a nearby farm-
house during most of the winter. One day the dog was brought
up to our place and walked past my doorway. Seconds later
I heard a shot, and twenty minutes after that De brought me

282 General Dean's Story

a nice piece of dog liver to eat. I was hungry enough to get
that down, but the longer I thought about it, the less I wanted
any more. The guards gorged themselves on dog meat for
three or four days, but I passed. It was too much like eating
an old friend.

During this time I was trading the guards English lessons,
on a fairly formal basis, for help with my Korean, but the
English classes proved harder than I had expected. They
wanted to learn the whole language in a couple of lessons,
including both capitals and script letters. Jealousy, too, began
to raise its ugly head. De Soon Yur had known much more
than any of the rest, but as the classes went on it was obvious
that Sohn was the brightest. He even learned to sound letters
well enough so that when he'd see a new English word he
could pronounce it. And Kim Ki Mon, a very slow-minded
man, made up for it by infinite patience, working at his Eng-
lish hour after hour, until I was completely exhausted. Both
of them were doing well; and almost immediately De began
to lose interest.

Just before going north I had acquired some cookies, two
pounds of sugar, and some cocoa. At the conclusion of the
English lessons I'd make hot chocolate (without milk, natu-
rally, but with plenty of sugar) and pass this around with the
cookies. Asi-monie didn't like cocoa but would hold out a
rice cup of hot water and take two heaping tablespoons of
sugar in that.

The classes continued until we used up all the sugar and De
insisted that I let him take the rest of the cookies to trade for
meat. After that the English course petered out, although Kim
Ki Mon never stopped his individual efforts.

As spring advanced, more and more farmers came out to
work their fields on the mountainside; schoolchildren were

The Long, Long Last Days 283

assigned to other fields, usually the rockiest and most difficult
to reach; and each of my guards spent a day a week helping
with the planting. Their activity cut down my exercise, be-
cause the rule that no one must see me still was in effect; but
I got plenty of sunbaths.

We moved, finally, to a house farther down the moun-
tain. The rest of those months were just boredom. Nobody
bothered me, and absolutely nothing happened not even
mail arrived. I received no letters from December 27, 1952,
until May 10, 1953, and then there was still no word about
my second grandchild, whom 1 knew was due in late winter.

On June 1 6 we moved south once more, for once traveling
in daylight, which gave me more chance to see the effects of
bombingthe razed cities, villages built in canyons, and rail-
road and highway damage and repairs. I also saw elaborate
truck hideouts in canyons and determined that supplies now
reached the front from the operating railhead through a truck
relay system that ran only at night.

Although the few houses remaining in old villages were
empty of people they weren't unused. Almost every one
bulged with sacks and boxes of military supplies or food.
Other supplies were carefully dumped in wild disarray, so
that they'd look like junk in aerial photographs or to the
pilots of planes. I was amazed at the gangs of Chinese, usually
wearing shorts and jerseys, working on the railroads; and
others were tilling the fields. Apparently they had just moved
in with the Korean country families, who worked side by
side with them, in perfect harmony so far as I could see.

Captain Oh told me later that if a Chinese soldier misbe-
haves with a North Korean woman he is shot immediately.
Fie said, "They have much stronger discipline in that respect
than we have, and the conduct of our men toward women is

284 General Dean's Story

much better than that of your troops. When we were retreat-
ing we lost many of our women soldiers because they were
ashamed to take off their clothes to cross rivers, embarrassed
to be nude; but the Chinese women soldiers think nothing of
it, and the men behave. You may think they do bad things,
but they don't."

The southbound trip was back on the truck-ride level (no
sedan, this time), and we took all our goods even a few
crates of live chickens obtained from the Kanggye farmers
with us. On the second day our truck was stopped at a river
crossing by a military policeman, who insisted that we let a
couple of other soldiers and an officer ride. This brought on
a terrific argument, with De, who was in charge of the truck,
finally losing out. The truck driver, however, was like all
North Korean chauffeurs, strictly independent, and perhaps
somebody had hurt his feelings, for he flatly refused to go on,
just sat there sulking, until a tank sergeant, one of those who
had just got on, smoothed things over.

A mile farther on another soldier, armed, tried to flag down
the truck. The driver wouldn't stop, and the soldier wouldn't
get out of the road. Just as the truck hit him he jumped for
the radiator cap and hung on.

This time the driver succeeded in making somebody mad.
When he finally did stop and this soldier ran around from
the radiator to yell at him, I thought there might be some
shooting but it ended with the soldier and his buddy getting
on to ride. Through the whole affair De had very little to say,
and the officer-passenger never opened his mouth.

We again passed much northbound traffic, but this was far
different from 1950. An entire Chinese regiment passed, young
troops, with their equipment in good shape, and I couldn't
imagine why they were going north, as it obviously was no

The Long, Long Last Days 285

retreat. I'm now sure they were headed back to China, in
view of the truce developments, and perhaps for Indo-China.

When we got back to the village near Sunan, Captain Oh
was there. He explained the traffic movements. Only one
question remained at issue in the armistice talks, he said, and
they surely would be completed in two or three days. "Gen-
eral," he said, "you'll soon be going home. Within thirty days
you'll be seeing your loved ones. It's only a matter of days
now until there is an armistice."

I hadn't seen Oh for some weeks, and he was being so
friendly that I too tried to be pleasant. I asked, "How is your
family, Captain?"

And once again I received that shocking answer: "I have
no family."

His mother, wife, and daughter had been killed in the
bombing of a village a week before.

Before we had gone north to Kanggye in February I'd
noticed the wives of the two guards working around their
small house nearby; and once I thought that Pak's wife looked
slightly pregnant. Now there was no doubt. On May 29 she
gave birth to a husky son. The garden she had worked on in
the autumn paid off too. She had corn, squash, soy beans,
Chinese cabbage, and half a dozen other vegetables growing
fine, where only waste land had been when she moved in.

The next time Captain Oh came to see me he said he had
bad news for me. General Harrison, of the United Nations
truce team, had just announced to the Communists that Syng-
man Rhee had liberated some twenty-five thousand non-Com-
munist prisoners of war without consulting the United States.

I said, "That sounds to me as if there will be no armistice."

He said, "No, this has delayed it, but there will be one."
He was still sure that my repatriation was only a matter of

286 General Dean's Story-

weeks at most, and he said, "You can't go home in those
clothes. You must have a new suit."

I said, "Why bother? The whole peace is off."

"Oh no," he said, "it will be fixed up. You must have a
white shirt and a new suit. What color do you want, brown
or blue?"

I said, a Brown-~I always wear brown."

Oh said, "I think blue is more becoming to youyou should
have blue."

A day or so later a tailor came to make elaborate measure-
ments, and finally the suit was delivered. It was blue.

Presently I moved once more, to a much nicer house on the
edge of a village complete with better food, a new cook, a
chance to walk without worrying whether anyone would see
me, and occasionally a swim in a river that ran at flood stage
because a reservoir in the hills had been bombed.

I gathered that the move to this house was to provide a
stage for an International Red Cross visit, but they never came.
In the meantime I made no protest whatsoever. I was living
better than I had in three years and had no intention of say-
ing anything to spoil it.

The only visitors I had were photographersa whole bevy
of movie men, both Chinese and Korean, who wanted to make
a story about one day of my life in prison. They were filming
what would have been a wonderful day, because they included
walking, swimming, sitting in a chair, eating bread (which
I hadn't seen for over a year), reading, even a few feet of me
fishing in the river with an old Korean all dressed up as if he
were on a picnic.

The picture-shooting was interrupted by unaccommodat-
ing bombers who knocked out the power lines, and on July
1 6 I found out what a bride feels like when she's left at the

The Long, Long Last Days 287

church. The photographers got word that a peace might be
signed at Panmunjom the next day and left me flat. They
took off like rockets, the Chinese for Peiping, the Koreans
driving all night toward Panmunjom. I don't know what, if
anything, ever happened to the film they already had shot.

By this time the general excitement over an impending
peace was beginning to affect me. And its sudden coming on
July 27 marked by a wild celebration in which hundreds of
thousands of rounds of ammunition were wasted at Pyong-
yangset a lot of things in motion. The very night of the
cease-fire trains began running in and out of Pyongyang
freely and at all hours. And with a speed remarkable when
you consider the lack of communications, thousands of peo-
ple suddenly surged out of the hills, leaving their caves and
scattered shanties to pour back into the valleys, to their bomb-
ruined homes.

I was informed of one more move to Kaesong. The
guards I had known for so long were left behind, and only
one new fellow went along. I felt as if I were parting from
long-time friends. We stopped in Pyongyang, and Captain
Oh took me to lunch at a very nice Western-style restaurant,
operating in the same building where I had waited briefly, in
1950, before being taken to see General Pak at the Security
Police headquarters. He also let me see what obviously was a
major headquarters, cut into the side of a hill near rice pad-
dies, but he could not get me permission to see the 30oo-seat
underground auditorium about which my guards had spoken.

Finally he turned me over to a lieutenant colonel and rode
in the jeep with us to a major intersection, then shook hands
and left us. The last I saw of him, he was standing on a corner,
waiting for one of the rickety buses which just had started to
run again in that demolished capital.

288 General Dean's Story

For me there was yet one more typical Korean auto ride
this one in a brand-new Russian jeep. I was dressed in my new
blue suit and new white shirt, by order, and had left behind
all the familiar equipment of the last three years, my two
blankets, my old clothes, and the dunnage bag that I had
labored so hard to make.

I was anxious to get started south, in the belief that I would
be repatriated that same day August 5. On the road I noted
with satisfaction the wrecked trains and shattered towns on
which the bombers really had done a thorough job. But I also
noticed that the jeep driver, every bit as independent as all
the others, liked to chase trucks. On one stretch he galloped
along for a full thirty miles, driving as hard as he could go and
blowing the horn constantly in an effort to get around a
convoy of six or eight trucks. But when Korean driver meets
Korean driver, neither will give an inch of authority, and
there's a real impasse. The trucks wouldn't get over, and our
driver wouldn't give up the idea of passing. So we ate dust.
My white shirt turned gray, the lieutenant colonel's uniform
became indistinguishable, and still we chased. At the risk of
our necks the jeep skinned past one, only to be stuck for more
miles behind the next. We were well over an hour getting
past the convoy. Then, the driver was in such a hurry to get
to Kaesong (you'd have thought he was the one being re-
patriated) that he skidded on a mountain curve, let the rear
wheel drop over the edge of a cliff, made a miraculous recov-
ery, and turned the jeep clear around in the road before he
could get it straightened out again. Still the officer didn't pro-
test. And, remarkably, we got into Kaesong finally, without
injury.

There I lived a luxurious life. My quarters were in a former
museum, my food was prepared by an excellent Chinese chef,

The Long, Long Last Days 289

I was able to walk twelve miles a day in a courtyard, and had
a mattress and sheets again. Once my original disappointment
at not being repatriated immediately had worn off , I was quite
comfortable. I bathed when I liked (a wonderful privilege)
in pools below a waterfall, built when American troops were
occupying the town before the war. New underwear and
socks were issued. When my blue suit, which fit very well,
needed to be pressed, a woman did it by the typical Korean
system, placing burning charcoal in what looked like a two-
egg iron skillet, then pressing the suit on a blanket spread on
the floor. It works fine, unless the presser gets nervous and
spills charcoal on the cloth.

The guarding lieutenant (head of quite an impressive squad
of guards who maintained a very military setup but no longer
bothered to keep a man in my room) and I played chong-
gun; and there was reading-matter. Also, there was far more
to drink than I wanted.

There was one false start early in August when an officer
told me one night, "Naile, tan-sen pasio" (tomorrow, you
go). So I destroyed every paper which I imagined could
delay my repatriation, saving only the letters that I had re-
ceived. I especially wanted to save the sixty-four that had been
written to me by my daughter. Someday I want her children
to see them, so that they'll have an idea of what a wonderful
person their mother really is. I packed my few belongings
once more; and in the morning I dressed again in my best.

Nothing happened at the scheduled hour of ten a.m., or all
morning. At one in the afternoon I shrugged off the prema-
ture hope and went back to my walking (twelve miles takes
about three hours to do), figuring that I would have to wait
at least until October z?, the ninetieth day from the cease-
fire, before they would let me go.

290 General Dean's Story

On September 3 my guards worked all day to bring into
the museum a big table and special chairs; and an extra cook
arrived and began to prepare a feast in the cook-house in a
corner of the courtyard. I asked questions, but all I could get
from any of them was the one word, "Planza, planza" It was
midafternoon before I connected thiswhich means "French"
or "France" or "Frenchman" with Wilfred Burchett, who
I had almost forgotten was French to them because he worked
for a French newspaper. Shortly before dinnertime he arrived
with a massive retinue of Chinese and Korean photographers
and reporters. He said, "I have bad news. This is the last time
I'll have an opportunity to eat with you. Bad news for me,
but good for you. Tomorrow you're going home."

Presently we ate, drank, and had an orgy of picture-taking,
centering on the presentation to me of two gift packages, one
from the United Nations Red Cross and a somewhat larger
one from the similar Communist organization. I was impatient
to get the photographing over with, for the most wonderful
item in the package was an American safety razor. I shaved
that night and again the next morning, the two most satisfy-
ing shaves of my life. I thought then that maybe I really was
going home.

But there was a little more delay. When I dressed in the
morning my fine clothes didn't suit the local guarding officer.
I must, he said, wear another outfit that day, a coarse suit of
some material almost like denim, a pink shirt, and a little blue
cap. So I changed, on his order, and bundled up my good
suit and the white shirt, not doing a very good job for fear
of delaying things.

About ten a.m. the lieutenant colonel who had escorted me
from Pyongyang, but had not stayed at Kaesong, showed up
and immediately jumped on the local officer for the way I was

The Long, Long Last Days 291

dressed. That outfit, he said, wouldn't do at all. There was
great palaver, and I was told to put on the blue suit again. But
it had been badly mussed by my quick wrapping, and they
had trouble getting it pressed quickly with the little egg-
skillet.

In all, by their directions I tried about three different com-
binations and ended up with a mixturethe new blue denim
trousers, the pink shirt, tennis shoes, and the coat from the
tailor-made suit. This satisfied nobody (except, perhaps, me,
as I was interested mostly in getting away) , but we obviously
had passed some sort of deadline and had to go. The lieutenant
colonel, a guard, and I took off in another new Russian jeep.

At the outskirts of Kaesong we came up alongside a column
of trucks standing beside the road. Some of the gaunt Ameri-
cans crowded into them recognized me and began to yell
those wonderful Yankee voices hollering, "Hey, General
Dean! Hi, General! We didn't know we were waiting for
you."

At the head of the column we stopped, and the Korean
escort got out. An English-speaking Chinese officer and a
Chinese guard with a sub-machine gun got in.

There were a few more minutes to wait long enough to
think briefly of three long years and the men I had known
during them: Colonel Kim, whom I want very much to meet
again, under different circumstances, when I might have a few
questions to ask him; Choi, the man who disliked admitting his
own orders but was terrified by the very thought of the Jap-
anese; the various lesser Kims; Captain Oh, who believed
simultaneously in the reality of germ warfare and the possi-
bility of a permanent peace by negotiation. But mostly I
thought about the guards, those sergeants who would hold a
blanket for hours around the shoulders of a chilling man or

292 General Dean's Story

laugh when they saw a dog being tortured to death; gorge
themselves one week and share with you their last bowls of
rice the next; steal from each other and give away their
precious pens or buttons; enforce the most rigorous regula-
tions or walk ten miles through the bitter cold for a letter
because they knew you wanted it. I thought of U Eun Chur,
the military man, and his hidden cigarettes; Kong, the tubercu-
lar who stood guard with an appendicitis drain in his side;
Big Pak, the one-time guerrilla and skilled carpenter; another
Pak who could make a watch crystal from a light bulb.

I thought of Lee and Tal, the scholarly interpreters; of
Burchett, the kindly man who cut himself off from his own
people for the sake of strange beliefs; of a couple of men who
risked their lives for me and probably saved mine but must
not be named because they still are in North Korea; of a
South Korean mountain farmer to whom I'd like to take a
carton of cigarettes and say, "Well, son, I did make it, in spite
of what you thought."

Most of all I thought of De Soon Yur, the man with the
short legs and stubby, wonderfully efficient fingers, the one
who was kind all the way. I wish that he could visit me in the
United States so that he could see with his own eyes just
what we have. It is possible for men to be enemies and friends
at the same time, and we were.

I won't pretend that I did more thinking at this one time;
but in those last hours I tried to add up a little the results of
three years in captivity, and to assess what, if anything, I had
learned from them. Perhaps Fm naturally naive, but the most
important discovery to me was that the ordinary Communists
who guarded me and lived with me really believed that they
were following a route toward a better life for themselves and
their children.

The Long, Long Last Days 293

It's easy for us to say, "Oh, but they're so badly mistaken."
It is not so easy to explain to these men of limited experience
just how, just why, this ideology must fail. The one perfectly
obvious thing is that we can't convince them with fine words.
We cannot convince them at all unless we're willing and able
to show them something betterwhich of course we can do
if we will.

What I mean is illustrated by that election of 1948 in South
Korea. It had faults, of course, but it was generally a free
election, with a secret ballot. Nothing was attacked by the
Communists with greater vigor. They tried to break it up at
the time; and my interrogators were determined to prove
that it had not been free, that it had been police-controlled,
that Americans somehow had manipulated it to suit themselves.
They desperately tried to discredit that election by any pos-
sible means.

I think the reason was simply that they in North Korea had
never given the people anything to compare with it, there-
fore they had to tear it down, somehow, before word of this
wonderful thing which Americans believed, and gave to the
people they helped, filtered too far, made their own people
ask too many questions. The better life means freedom, in
anybody's language, and it was the one thing the Communists
could not afford to allow north of the border.

I think the worst moment I had in North Korea was with
one of my guards, the slow-brained Kim Ki Mon who was
working so hard to learn English. Without warning one day
he drew in the dirt a clear map of the Korean peninsula. He
said, "Chosen (Korean) house, okay?"

I said, "Yes, Chosen house."

He said, "Not American house?"

I said, "No."

294 General Dean's Story

"But Americans," he said, a in Chosen house. Why?"
You and I know the complicated answer to that, but we
have to make that man understand it too, if we would not have
him hate us. For all of Asia we must have that answer, simply
told.

I have mentioned before my own acute embarrassment
when a North Korean interrogator said to me, "Did you ex-
plain to each of your men personally why they were fight-
ing?" and I had to lie to him because I had failed to do that
in the twenty days I was with troops on the Korean penin-
sula, although I always had made a point of it in World War
II and in Japan. Of all the resolutions I made in three years,
I believe that one never to let such a question cause me to
lie again is the most durable. I think it needs to be expanded
to a general principle. Each of us needs to know exactly why
we're fighting, in Korea or anywhere else. If we fail to under-
stand itthrough ignorance, sloth, or insufficient explanation
we don't do a good job even though we win. An army can
be a show-window for democracy only if every man in it is
convinced that he is fighting for a free world, for the kind of
government he wants for himself, and that he personally rep-
resents the ideals that can make a world free. And every indi-
vidual in that army must realize that his whole country is
judged by his behavior, at home and abroad, and not by the
ideals to which he gives lip service,

I am a troop commander and in no sense a politician; and I
speak for no one else and no organization when I make public
these things I think. But I do believe them: that we must
present a better world than the Communists. We must have
an answer simple enough for the dullest to understand. We
must, each of us, really know the things for which we fight.
If I learned anything in captivity, those were the lessons.

The Long, Long Last Days 295

Presently the column of trucks with our jeep at Its head
moved south toward Panmunjom, past increasing piles of
American clothing which would have been precious any-
where in North Korea thrown away in the neutral zone by
Communist repatriated prisoners as they rode north. We
passed several northbound truckloads of these men, nearly
naked, shouting and screaming and waving tiny little North
Korean flags like so many truckloads of monkeys.

Beside me, the Chinese officer, in clipped English, said,
"Now, when we get there, don't you get out until they call
your name. A Chinese officer will come down the line and
read off the names. But don't you get out of the jeep until
your name is called."

We passed an American military policeman, standing at an
intersection with his parked jeep, his boots, helmet, and equip-
ment all shining and immaculate. Behind me the Americans in
the trucks set up a concerted shouting; but for once no sol-
dier taunted an MP. They were too glad to see him.

We pulled up to the exchange point, and immediately a big
American colonel stepped to the side of the jeep and saluted
me. He said, "Welcome back, General Dean. Will you step
out, sir?"

Whereupon the Chinese officer spluttered, "No, no, not
until his name is called."

The colonel swung toward the Chinese, and suddenly looked
twice his size. I don't doubt that he had been tried beyond
endurance by this same Chinese before and was technically
correct when he said, "Your authority is finished, right here.
We'll take over, right now." As he spoke he took a step
toward the Chinese.

But I could see that this might develop into something

296 General Dean's Story

highly unpleasant and there were trucldoads of men waiting

behind me.

I said, "Never mind, Colonel. Let them call off the names.
A few more minutes won't matter now. 7 '

Nor did they.

CHRONOLOGY
INDEX

Korean 'War Chronology

June 25, 1950 North Koreans cross the 38th parallel, invading
South Korea.

June 30, 1950 President Truman orders U.S. ground forces to
Korea.

July 31- Americans retire to Naktong perimeter (high-

Aug.4, 1950 water mark of Communist invasion).

Aug. 6, 1950 U.N. forces battle to hold beachhead in southeast
corner of the Korean peninsula.

Sept. 15, 1950 U.N. troops make amphibious landing at Inchon,
170 miles behind Red lines, and begin offensive
drive into North Korea.

Sept. 26, 1950 U.S. forces recapture Seoul.
Oct. 7, 1950 U.N. forces cross 38th parallel.
Oct. 19, 1950 U.N. forces capture Pyongyang.

Oct. 26, 1950 Marines land at Wonsan, on east coast; U.N.
troops drive toward Manchurian border; Chinese
forces in the war.

Nov. 26, 1950 Chinese Communists launch massive drive that
eventually carries past the 38th parallel.

Dec. 24, 1950 Evacuation of Hamhung completed by U.S.
forces.

Jan. 4, 1951 U.N. forces lose Seoul a second time.

299

300 Korean War Chronology

Jan. 14, 1951 U.N. forces stop Chinese thrust 75 miles below
38th parallel.

March 18, 1951 U.N. forces recapture Seoul.
June 13, 1951 U.N. forces drive to 38th parallel.

June 23, 1951 Jacob Malik, Russia's representative to the United
Nations, says: "Discussions should be started . . .
for a cease fire."

July 10, 1951 Truce talks begin.

Dec. 1 8, 1951 U.N. and Communists exchange prisoner lists.

July 27, 1953 Cease fire!

Sept. 4, 1953 Repatriation of prisoners begins.

Ahn Chai Hong, 111-12

Almond, Maj. Gen. Edward (Ned),
1 80

Ansong, Korea, 20, 21, 23

Armed Forces, U.S.; see also United
Nations forces
ist Cavalry Division, 28, 38
ist Infantry Division, 189
3rd Infantry Division, 189
yth Infantry Division, n, no, 138,

J 39

Eighth Army, u, 25, 120, 181, 189
1 9th Infantry ("Rock of Chicka-

mauga") Regiment, 14, 26, 27-28
2 ist Infantry Regiment, 14, 26, 27
24th Infantry Division, 12, 13-14,

15, 16, 17, 100, 113, 115, 124, 251;

24th Division Medical Battalion,

103

24th Infantry Regiment, 100
25th Infantry Division, 28, 100
3oth Infantry Regiment, 8
34th Infantry Regiment, 14, 20, 21,

23, 24-30, 36, 48
38th Infantry Regiment, 6
44th Infantry Division, 910
63rd Field Artillery Battalion, 27-

28

Air Force, U.S., 240
Marines, U.S., 134, 182, 189
Task Force Smith, 18, 20, 21, 22,

105

X Corps 1 80, 189, 245
Armed Forces Industrial College, 8

Army War College, 8
Ascom City, Korea, 106
Asi-monie, 280-81, 282

Barth, Brig. Gen. George, 21-22
Beauchamp, Col. Charles, 36
Beiderlinden, Brig. Gen. William A.,

9

Berkeley, Calif., 6, 90, 151, 261
Big Pak, 267, 292

Bissett, Capt. David, 46, 67-68, 258
Bradley, Gen. Omar N., 229
Brown, Col. Rothwell, 148
Burchett, Wilfred, 238-45, 248, 249,

251, 255, 256, 257, 260, 290, 292

Camp Hackamore, Calif., 8
Carlyle, 111., 5
Cheju-do, Korea, 142, 147
Chemical Warfare School, 8
Chian, Manchuria, 184-86
"Chicks," see Armed Forces: i9th

Infantry Regiment
Chinan, Korea, 49, 74, 77, 79, 86, 87,

93, in, 179
Chinese forces, 173, 181, 187, 189,

2IO-H, 215, 239, 261, 263, 283-84
Chinese People's Republic, 249, 255
Chinsan, Korea, 50, 57
Chochiwon, Korea, 26, 27, 154
Choesin-dong, Korea, 174, 201
Choi, Lt. Col., 137, 139-40, 144, 145,

146, 148, 150, 153, 158, 160-64,

190, 200, 234, 235-36, 291

3 OI

302

Choi Cheng Bong, 82
Chonan, Korea, 19, 23, 24, 25
Chonju, Korea, 60, 76, 88, 102, 107,

109, in

Chosen National Bank, 144
Chun, 240, 241
Church, Brig. Gen. John EL, 17, 19-

20

Cicero, Dave, 253
Civilian Conservation Corps, 8
Clarke, Lt. Arthur M., 21, 30-35, 39-

44, 45-46, 67-68, 103, in, 158, 258
Command and General Staff School,

8
Communist doctrine, 12223, 126-27,

167, 170-71, 192, 278-79
Communists (North Korean), n,

64, 86, 107, 117, 130, 135, 138, 147,

150, 274, 278, 292-93-, see also
Inmun Gun and North Korean
Army

De Han Gool, 211, 231, 264-65, 267
De Soon Yur, 164, 167-68, 180, 192,

193-94, 202, 2O8, 212, 213, 22O-2I,

223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229-30, 231,
232-33. 237, 2 5<>i 25 2 i 259, 262, 264,
265, 267, 280, 281-82, 284, 292

Dean, Charles Watts, 5

Dean, David, 6

Dean, Elizabeth Frishe, 6, 250, 251

Dean, Mildred Dern, 7-8, 13, 67-68,

151, 156, 234, 241, 243, 250, 251,
258, 261

Dean, William (Bill), 13, 156, 243

Deane, Philip, 124

Dern, Mildred, see Dean, Mildred

Dern

Dulles, John Foster, 138
Dunn, Maj. John J,, 36

E Sun Koom, Sgt., 188, 194-95
Eun Suk Koo, 94, 97

Fort Benning Infantry School, 8

Index

Fort Douglas, Utah, 6-8

Fort Leaven worth, Kan., 8, 10, 141

General Staff, War Dept., 8
Geneva Convention, 100, 141, 162,
184, 237

Hamhung, Korea, 189

Hampton, Col. Henry (Hank), 219-

20

Han Doo Kyoo, 78-82, 85
Han River, Korea, 109
Handlcman, Howard, 253
Harrison, Gen. William K., 285
Hatficld, Capt. Raymond D., 37-38,

68

Hodge, Lt. Gen. John R., 10
Hong, Lt. Col., 137, 140-42, 145, 146,

147, 148, 150, 153, 158-59, 161
Huichon, Korea, 165-66, 168-71, 173,

203, 274-75

Imjin River, Korea, 116, 117
Inchon, Korea, 15, no, 134, 165, 215
Inmun Gun ("People's Army"), 48,
50, 51, 72, 77, 78-79, 84, 86, 87, 95,
97, 99, 104, 109-10, 113, 115, 117,
237, 258-59, 265, 275; see also North
Korean Army
Innsbruck, Austria, 10
International News Photos, 261
International Red Cross, 286, 290

Japanese Coast Guard, 15
Japanese troops, 190

Kaesong, Korea, 117, 239, 264, 287,

288, 291
Kanggye, Korea, 173-74, 271-72, 275,

279, 280-81, 285

Keane, Maj. Gen. William, 100
Kim, Capt., 183-86, 188, 192, 204-205
Kim, CoL, 123-24, 126-28, 130-33,

136-39, 141, 145-47, 15*1 *52, I54~

160, 161, 186, 216, 218, 236, 249, 291

Index

303

Kirn, Jimmy, 30

Kim, Kimmy, 93

Kim, Maj., 137, 142-44, 153, 158, 206,

224, 228-29, 234-35, 263
Kim II Sung, 239, 245, 266, 270-71
Kim II Sung University, Korea, 120
Kim Ki Mon, 282, 293
Kim Kyu Sik, 111-12
Kim Song Su, 208, 212
Kim Sung Soo, 1 16
Kokura, Japan, 12
Kong, 211, 221-22, 265, 292
Kongju, Korea, 26, 27
Korean Military Advisory Group

(KMAG), 16, 121
Korean People's Republic, 240, 242
Kum River, Korea, 18, 23, 26, 27, 28
Kumchon, Korea, 19, 49
Kumsan, Korea, 33, 39, 48, 49, 57, 60
Kunu-ri, Korea, 274

Lee, Maj. Gen., 235-37, 245

Lee Bum Suk, 21

Lee Heung Koon, Gen., 140

Lee Kyu Hyun, 120-23, 125, 131, 133,

135, 159, 164-65, 292
Li Heng Peng, 251, 253-55, 256-58
Liberation Park, Pyongyang, 120,

267

Liu, 248-49
Lovett, Robert, 229

Mac Arthur, Gen. Douglas, 107, 138,

229

Manchuria, 183-86
Manpo, Korea, 174, 175-80, 182, 187,

196, 198, 199, 211, 231
Marshall, Gen. George C., 229
Martin, Col. Robert B., 24-25, 36, 68
McCarthy, Joseph, 123
McDaniel, Maj. S. C., 36-37
Meloy, CoL Guy S. (Stan), 27
Menoher, Brig. Gen. Pearson, 28
Muir, Maj. Gen. James I., 9

Muju, Korea, 72, 74
Myungja, 280-81

Noel, Frank, 245, 254

Nonsan, Korea, 28

North Korean Army, 13, 15, 19, 21,
22, 24, 25, 27, 30, 33, 41, 42, 43, 45,
46-47, 49, 53, 55, 59, 67, 72, 84, 93,
96, 102, 105, no, 113, 115, 121, 134,
139, 153, 174, 175, 178, 239, 248, 259,
266, 267, 272, 275, 295; see also
Inmun Gun

North Korean people, 121, 124-25,
138, 211-12
homes, 165-69, 176-77

Northwest Youth Group, 24

Oahu, T.H., 8

Oh Ki Man, Capt., 224, 229, 234, 237,
238, 240-41, 245-46, 247-48, 249,
250, 252, 256, 257-58, 261, 262, 263,
264, 265, 266, 267, 268-71, 276-77,
283, 285-86, 287, 291

Okchon, Korea, 27

Okinawa, 144

Omaha Beach, France, 9

Oreo, Korea, 119

Osan, Korea, 19, 20, 21, 22, 105

Pack Chun Bong, 164, 174, 194, 195,

204, 206, 208, 211, 212, 230, 265
Paekchon, Korea, 117
Pak, 208, 212, 267, 285, 292
Pak, Gen,, 133, 141, 151, 287
Panama Canal Zone, 8
Pang Ha Sae, Lt. Gen., 133
Panmunjom, Korea, 252, 253, 287,

295

Partridge, Lt. Gen. Earle E., 75
People's Army, see Inmun Gun
Perry, CoL Basil H., 22
Pusan, Korea, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22,

60, 75, 76, 93, 97, 130
Pyongtaek, Korea, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24,

28

304 Index

Pyongyang, Korea, 117, 119-21, 125, Sunan, Korea, 125-26, 129, 136, 151,

133, 135, 136, 164-65, 214, 235, 252, 197, 199, 211, 285

254, 267-68, 272, 287 Suwon, Korea, 18, 19, 105, 109, 115,

Pyun, 195-96, 202 220

Redding, Calif., 8

Republic of Korea (ROK) Army,

see South Korean Army
Requirements Div. of Ground

Forces, 8-9, 260
Rhee, Clarence, 85
Rhee, President Syngman, 22, 82, 90,

91, 96, 101, 107, 112, 117, 127, 138,

162, 164, 240, 285

Rich, John, 253

Roberts, Brig. Gen. Lynn, 16

Rowlands, Capt. Richard, 34, 42

Sangjon-myon, Korea, 86

Sapporo, Japan, n

Security Police, North Korean

Army, 115, 120, 133, 169
Seoul, Korea, 10-11, 15, 16, 18, 84,

108, 109, no, 115, 116, 121, 141,

163, 178, 180, 189, 204, 206, 216
Smith, Lt. Col. Charles B. (Brad),

17, 22

Sohn, 281, 282

Song Ho, Brig. Gen,, 148, 266
South Korea, U.S. military govern-
ment, lo-n, 92-93, 112, 141-44,

147-50, 162-64, 293
South Korean (ROK) Army, 14, 18,

19, 20-21, 33, 105, 108, 121, 139-40,

142, 148

i4th ROK Regiment, 148
South Korean government, 90, 92, 95,

96, 124, 127, 138, 139, 147-48, 293
South Korean people, 19, 87, 107, 132
Spragins, Maj, Gen. Robert L., 9
Stalin, Joseph, 117, 215, 245, 255-56
Stevens, Col. Richard ("Big Six"),

27
Sukchon, Korea, 165

Tabor, Lt. Stanley, 48-54, HI
Tacgu, Korea, 19, 49, 50, 56, 60, 73,

74i 7<$, 77i 93, Hi
Taejon, Korea, 17, 18-19, 20, 22, 26,

27-33. 3 6 > 37-38 42, 49, 54, 102-103,

240

Taepyong-ni, Korea, 27
Tal, 137, 154, 164, 168, 169, 179, 180,

189, 200, 258-59, 292
Tass, 97

j8th parallel, u, 13, 14, 132, 216, 239
Tokyo, 264

Truman, Harry S., 101
Tuckman, Robert, 253

U Bong Song, 211
U Eun Chur, Sgt., 164, 165, 172, 174,
175, 177, 192-93, 194, 197, 199-200,

2OI-202, 204, 206, 208, 20OII, 217
2O, 228, 292

Um, 211, 265

United Nations, 92, 113, 122, 197,

2 3S> 245* 2 59> 2 %

United Nations forces, 102, no, 121,
128, 171, 201, 204, 215, 216, 229,
2 37 *37* 2 39> 2 <>7> 270, 271, 277

University of California, 6, 122

Ver Mehr, Mrs. Leonard, 6,
Vermillion, Robert, 253
Vollmer, August, 6

Wadlington, Lt. Col, Robert L.

(Pappy), 36, 38
Walker, Lt. Gen. Walton, n, 25-26,

130-31, 219-20, 229
Wallace, Henry, 101
War Dept. General Staff, 8

Index 305

Welch, Dorothy, 7 Yalu River, Korea, 120, 174, 183, 189,

White, Cpl. Malcolm D., 114 215

Williams, June Dean, 13, 68, 156, Yokohama, Japan, 1 1

241, 243, 250, 258, 289 Yongdam, Korea, 65

Williams, Capt. Robert, 13 Yongdong, Korea, 27, 28, 37, 49

Wmnington, Alan, 241, 260 Yongdong-po, Korea, 163

Wonsan, Korea, 182 Yusong, Korea, 26

U.N. COUNTSWU&H TO
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